True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (5 page)

Taxis were parked outside the redbrick train station, but because I always do things the hard way, I let them leave with other passengers
and started walking, with a black nylon flight bag—too small to hold clothes, a tape recorder, and the book about Hemingway—slung on a strap from my shoulder, the book like a circuit rider's Bible in my hand. There are back streets in Cheltenham that look like back streets in Queens, New York, or Birmingham, Alabama, Depression-era apartment buildings and houses with lawns where no grass grows. The book and the bag were both getting heavy by the time I reached the center of town. Cheltenham was built mostly during the Regency, and the stately columns of the Municipal Center regard, across the broad Promenade and its tree-darkened sidewalks, the Imperial Gardens, bright with red, mauve, and yellow tulips planted in neat curves and rectangles, sparrows dancing about, pigeons whirling and coursing overhead.

I walked on to a side street, found a phone kiosk, and from its picture in the yellow pages chose the Majestic Hotel on Park Place. It looked like the hotel where W. C. Fields would stay when he was in town. It was also between where I was and Hatherley Road, where Brian Jones grew up.

I had walked far enough to welcome, if I had any sense, a ride in a taxi, but I was not ready for that. I wanted to walk past the fine shops of the Promenade and the neat houses under the manicured trees. Cheltenham was designed to be a nice place, and it is a nice place, up to the point where they decide you are not so nice. Some of Cheltenham's nicest people had not spoken to Brian Jones' mother and father in years, while others stopped speaking to them only when Brian was buried in consecrated ground, his final outrage. You can listen close and hear the clippers clipping the hedges of Cheltenham.

The Majestic Hotel loomed like a faded ghost among apartment buildings going to seed. The desk clerk was in a little glass case like a ticket booth. The bartender leaned on his elbows in the empty cocktail bar, wrinkling the sleeves of his starched white jacket. The elevator smelled as if it had been closed since the 1920s. Slowly it took me to the third floor, to my single with a sink. The room was loaded, as are all single hotel rooms, with intimations of loneliness and death, of killing the night in loneliness. I lay down on the salmon-colored bedspread.

My feet rested for a few minutes, but my mind didn't. No book is any help against loneliness, and no drug can touch it. After she left him, Brian must have kept on thinking about Anita Pallenberg as, alone, I kept on thinking. Anita thought that Marlon, the son she had with Keith last year after Brian died, would be Brian reborn. He wasn't, but she did not stop thinking about Brian. “I'll see him again. We promised to meet again. It was life or death,” Anita said. “One of us had to go.” A tough decision. I swung my tired feet off the bed. Thinking was getting me nowhere.

The elevator was just as slow going down. The bartender was still leaning on the bar, not a customer in sight.

I walked back to the Imperial Gardens and sat on a green park bench to smoke some marijuana and observe the end of Wednesday afternoon. Maids were clearing the red, blue, and green tables under the orange-and-yellow-striped umbrellas that said
Tuborg,
where a few people were still eating snacks among the flowers. The inscription on the gardens' sundial read: “I only count your sunny hours/Let others tell of storms and showers.” Now just one boy and girl were lying on the grass, not moving, as if they intended to spend the night here.

Looking out over the tulips and trees and softly humming motors of twilit Cheltenham, I thought of Brian saying, on a visit home near the end of his life, “If only I'd never left here.” I fieldstripped the cigaret end, tearing the short paper, rolling it into a tiny pill that would vanish, with the smoking material, into the wind. Then I crossed the Promenade, passing the third military monument I'd seen in this town. The two others were for Africa 1899–1902 and World War I. This one's plaque read, “This memorial was originally surmounted by a gun taken at Sevastopol. During the war of 1939–1945 the gun was handed to the government to provide the metal for armaments.” Though it was smaller, Cheltenham reminded me of Macon, Georgia, where I went to high school wearing an army uniform, carrying a rifle: the last place where I felt constrained to fieldstrip cigarets, not because of smoking marijuana, but to keep the area well-policed. Both are pretty towns with many trees.

It was 6:44, and I just had time for a sandwich. Down the street was a café that looked as deserted as the bar at the Majestic, just an East Indian girl in a white uniform behind the counter. She was putting things away, getting ready to close, but she asked if I wanted to eat.

I bought a watery orange drink and a cheese sandwich, because there aren't many ways to ruin a cheese sandwich. A woman came in, took the money from the cash register, let the girl out the back door and locked it. As the girl left I realized that she had the only dark skin I had seen in this town.

Back at the hotel, I was so cool and relaxed that my tape recorder was still packed away when the desk clerk called to say that a taxi was waiting. I loaded the recorder with tape and then decided to leave it.

Before I could look over my notes the taxi pulled into the parking lane to let me out. The mustard-colored semi-detached houses with tiny squares of glass behind brick fences, perched uneasily on the rim of the middle class, looked so small and regular that I thought I must be at the wrong place. But I entered at the gate and went up to the front door, where a glowing plastic bell-ringer bore the name L. B. Jones. I rang the bell and waited, trying to smile. It was night now, and I was standing in a pool of yellow light under the porch lantern, cars racing past on the dark road, flashing in each other's headlights.

The little man who opened the door had receding grey hair and a rather broad but sharp-nosed face, red under the pale, lined skin. As I
began talking, I couldn't stop thinking that he was the same size as Brian, that they must have identical skeletons. He had Brian's, or Brian had his, way of walking almost on tiptoe, holding his hands back beside his hips. He had the same short arms and small, strong hands, and though Mr. Jones' eyes, behind glasses framed with gilt metal and grey plastic, did not have the quality Brian's eyes had of being lit from within, he had Brian's funny one-eyed way of looking at things. He stood before me, one foot forward, hands down by his pockets almost in fists, peering with one eye.

I said who I was, Mr. Jones said he was glad to see me and led me into the living room, where I sat on a couch, my back to the front wall, and he sat in a stuffed chair printed with ugly flowers before the unlit electric fireplace. He told me that I was the fourth of my countrymen who had come to discuss writing about Brian. “People come with letters from publishers, then they go away and one hears nothing more. I don't know what to make of it. I think they're pulling my leg,” he said, again turning one eye on me.

I started to answer him, getting as far as, “Er, ah,” when Brian's mother came in. I struggled to my feet and said hello. She looked gentler than Mr. Jones. She called him Lewis and he called her Louie, short for Louisa. Her eyes were a normal, pretty blue. Her hair was as yellow as Brian's, a shade that appeared to age well if given the chance.

We all sat down, Mrs. Jones in a chair at one end of the room, me at the other end, Mr. Jones in the middle, gazing at the cold fireplace. I tried to explain what I was doing, but the room was capturing all my mind. It contained, besides us and an orange tomcat, typically turgid English furnishings, an old Heathkit record player, an older radio, a black and white television set, a flowering bonsai tree under a glass dome, an American Indian figurine given to each of the Stones in 1964 by the German teen magazine
Bravo,
and on the mantle over the fire-place, a little rubber doll with bright red trousers and a white mane of spun nylon hair, the most vulgar possible caricature of Brian, and yet it seemed a totem to him, the central object in this tiny grotesque room. The orange cat curled in Mrs. Jones' lap. I asked his name, and she said “Jinx.”

“Such a shame,” Brian's father was saying. “Brian could have been a brilliant journalist, he could always play better chess than anyone else at school, so much talent wasted.” He put his back teeth together and grimaced as if a horrible transformation was taking place.

Mrs. Jones asked, “Did you have a good supper tonight, love?”

I thought of the supper I had tonight and other suppers missed and other things than suppers missed and some of the things not missed, all because of what I had seen in her son's eyes. “Fine, thanks,” I said. Then I started asking questions.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones met in South Wales, where they were living with their parents. Mr. Jones' parents were schoolteachers. His father sang in opera societies and led the choir at church. Mrs. Jones' father was for over fifty years a master builder and church organist near Cardiff. Mrs. Jones' mother was sickly and so didn't train for anything and was now quite well at eighty-three. Her parents were living, his were dead.

Mr. Jones studied engineering at Leeds University, then married and started working for Rolls-Royce. In 1939, with the war under way, he was transferred to Cheltenham, where he and Mrs. Jones had lived ever since, he working as an aeronautical engineer, she giving piano lessons.

Brian was born on the last day of February 1942. The Joneses' second child, a daughter, died at about the age of two.

“How did she die?” I asked as gently as possible.

“She died, and that's all I'll say about it,” Mr. Jones said. I tried to explain again why I was asking questions, but Mr. Jones had been hurt too many times by lies and by the truth in print, and he was nowhere near ready to trust a writer. He told me that their youngest child, Barbara, born in 1946, now a physical education teacher, wanted no part of anything to do with Brian, and he asked me to leave her alone. He ground his teeth again. But he couldn't stop himself from talking and bringing out family photograph albums.

One photograph showed Brian about five years old, playing with a grey tabby cat.

“One day when both Brian and the cat were very young, Brian announced that the cat's name was Rolobur,” said Mrs. Jones. “ ‘That's Rolobur,' he said. Don't know whether he was trying to say something else and it came out Rolobur, or what. He painted it blue once.”

“The cat?”

“With no idea to hurt it,” Mr. Jones said. “Which he didn't, he used food coloring that soon came off, and the cat lived with us for about sixteen years.”

“Brian was a strange child,” his mother said.

She started giving Brian piano lessons when he was six, and he studied it until he was fourteen. “But he wasn't terribly interested,” she said. “Then he started playing the clarinet.”

“Which didn't help his asthma any,” Mr. Jones said. “Brian had croup when he was four, and it left him with asthma. He had terrible asthma attacks. It was always bad when he went to the beach on holiday, and he'd been having bad attacks down at Cotchford, very bad attacks down there just before his death.”

Cotchford Farm was once the home of A. A. Milne; Pooh Bear lived in its Hefalump Wood. It seemed right that Brian should have the place, where he died so soon, less than a year after he bought it. Many things
had hurt him by then, and Mr. Jones could not stop going over them, trying to find where things went wrong, where to place the blame. “I was down there with him, in a sort of junk room there at Cotchford, not long before he died. He came across a photograph of Anita and just stood for a moment looking at it. He said, ‘Anita,' almost as if he were talking to himself, as if he'd forgotten I was there. Then he put the photograph down and we went on talking, doing what we'd been doing. The loss of Anita upset him terribly. Nothing was the same for Brian after that. Then the drug charges, all that trouble. I didn't know how to help him. We were close when he was young, but later we had. . . differences of opinion.”

So much promise . . . a choirboy . . . first-chair clarinet . . . now ol friends were saying, Well, it's about time you retired, isn't it? He stared at the cold fire, clenching his teeth, then went on talking.

“Brian rejected all discipline. He was suspended from school twice. Once when he was in the sixth form he and some of the other lads used their mortarboards as boomerangs, sailing them up in the air. Brian's came apart, and he refused to wear it. They suspended him. ‘A most salutary experience' for Brian, a week's suspension, according to that twit of a headmaster. Brian spent the whole week down at the Cheltenham Lido, swimming, and came back a hero to all the other boys. I hardly knew how to deal with him. The headmaster would complain about him, and I'd become very serious and sit Brian down for a talk. ‘Why is the headmaster always writing us with complaints? Why do you disobey them?' And Brian would say, ‘Look, Dad, they're only teachers. They've never done anything. You want me to do the things you did, but I can't be like you. I have to live my own life.' He was terribly logical about it all. I could hardly get anywhere trying to argue with him.

“Brian simply loathed school, the exams, the discipline, all that. He made his O levels and A levels in spite of himself. At eighteen he left school. He wouldn't consider going to university. He had a dread of going to university and couldn't face years of study before he could be self-supporting. He hated the idea of being twenty-five or twenty-six before he could start earning his own living. For a while he was keen on dentistry, but after he left school, he decided to go to work in London for an ophthalmic firm. There was an ophthalmic college affiliated with the firm, and Brian studied there for a while, at the same time he was working. The firm had a branch in Newport, but Brian wanted to go to London. He wanted the London nightlife, the jazz clubs, all that. He loved jazz, Stan Kenton, that sort of thing.