As he talked Sonny liked to pace, and also to eat; so that we were dutifully swivelling, backwards and forwards across the table, like the crowd in the Hitchcock tennis match, following him as he made his way to the refrigerator for another handful of black olives. (The family supper had dwindled by this time to a carton of leather-skinned yogurt and an anchovy that was waiting to be carbon-dated.) When Sonny had accumulated a dozen or so stones in his paw, he would arrive at the head of the table and roll them emphatically towards us, like poker dice. ‘Ah, um. Ah.’
The pitch that Sonny went for — the only concept with filmic possibilities — was the notion that Roland should act out some play, it didn’t matter what, in the deconsecrated synagogue at Princelet Street. We can light it with millions of candles, swing incense, wave flags: let’s go for it. Ivan the Terrible, part 3!
‘But hold up, boys, don’t get carried away too soon. If living actors are involved, we’re hung up on paying union rates, the budget is blown: we’ll have to lunch in some bug-infested Brick Lane rat hole. That’s serious stuff. The catering is not your department. Just give me seven and a half sheets of negotiable paper that I can take upstairs, without getting egg on my face.’
VI
I drank coffee with Roland Bowman in his basement kitchen. As we chatted, I searched for the photograph of the dancer, Edith Cadiz; but it was no longer on show. Secretly, this pleased me. I didn’t want to know if the photograph had changed: if it showed some fresh aspect of Edith’s disappearance that I would have to act upon. Any minor alteration in the image would mean an alteration in the account I had already written of it.
Roland was perfectly willing to discuss the director’s latest temporary enthusiasm. Previous experiences with the Corporation had resigned him to any twists of fate, however bizarre. He was excited to be involved, but knew in his heart nothing would come of it. He had been in the synagogue once before, with a Firbank adaptation, that had drawn the town, but passed unnoticed in Fleet Street. Now curiously, Fleet Street had marched — like Birnam Wood — to the Isle of Dogs, while Roland held, blindly, to his ground.
It was happening again: the preternatural sensitivity of this ambiguous setting. Nothing was fixed in age, or in gender; only ‘place’ was constant. Roland anticipated the request I had not yet brought myself to make. He shot upstairs and returned with a large brown envelope containing Edith’s notes for the play she wanted him to stage. The play had been delivered, in a woeful state, by a wild-haired messenger, whose condition paralleled the package he was carrying. A dog kept him company. A dog that Roland recognized. The animal had been to Fournier Street before.
The synagogue was now part of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre (by rumour, a front for storing Georgian plunder), so there should be no problem about using it for the performance. We’d take our spot in the queue, behind the primitive artists and the stockbroker wedding receptions. Roland made only one condition. He would not give us sight of his script until there had been a private ‘run through’, which Fredrik and I would attend: no lights, cameras, or crew were, at this stage, to be involved.
VII
The house in Well Street, Hackney, where Neb lodged was a curious one, but no more curious than its landlord. Elgin MacDiarmuid was a premature New Georgian: he might well have survived, under a preservation order, and several layers of black animal fat, from the era of the slobbering Hanoverians. He lived, and had for years, before cults or articles, in absolute squalor. He broke his fast, when he was ‘off the gargle’, on bottles of sweet South African sherry; dropping, painlessly, into an insulin-coma that necessitated long sandal-flapping treks out along the canal, and into the leafy suburbs: brooding on ancient glories, or the wives that were flown, along with his inheritance and his favourite four-poster bed. In these sere and yellowed years — he had now turned forty — the ‘black dog’ was much with him. He sulked in kitchens, he moaned; and sucked for comfort on loose strands of hair, thereby fulfilling most of his dietary requirements. He was amused, as a compensatory fantasy, to announce himself as the hereditary ‘Lord of the Isles’ — ‘dear boy’ — or, at the very least, his younger brother. He woke daily in the expectation of a piper at the door. He took to attending clan gatherings, sodden wakes, packed with embalming-fluidperfumed Canadians, and canny lowland advocates who charged these foreign puddocks a fierce price for two or three nights of rough-hewn crofter living.
Elgin was running down the last of the family properties; hanging grimly on until the concept of ‘Docklands’ could be stretched to include Hackney. Or until they buried him under a motorway sliproad. The family had been traditionally ‘turncoat’; betrayers of Parnell, dinner guests of Black Tim Healy, friends of the Castle. They had thrived on it, to the extent of a brace of hotels in the Joyce Country, and a scatter of London hideaways for the drunks and the gamblers, too far gone to pick a decent American pocket.
Elgin’s father’s frock coat, a skimpy thing, torn at the seams, and green as moss, barely covered a snuff-stained string vest, and a heaving gut, that would have bulged, if it had not long since collapsed utterly, to hang dead over his leather-belted moleskins: the only surviving legacy of too many nights of ‘great crack’ and inferior bottled Guinness.
CRACK. The word proved something of a liability when Elgin bellowed it to the world at large: drawing DHSS snoops, vagrants, and outpatients on walkabout, down on his parlour. ‘Great crack, lads. You should have been there last night,’ he would cry, even to the fur-tongued companions who had stuck with him to the unforgiving steel of dawn. Now barrio-rats, and spike-skulled squatters from distressed chip vans, broke surface; to nail these rumours that worried them, like the smell of baking bread in a starving city. They turned the place over, ripped up the floors, slashed the mattresses, and sprayed the walls with libellous assertions. In their justifiable vexation, they set fire to crates of Elgin’s scrolled genealogies, his family portraits. He hardly noticed. Worse things, by far, waited every time he closed his eyelids.
The wiring in Elgin’s den burst from the walls in a shower of sparks; vines or snake trophies, inadequately disguised by layers of paper that rivalled a definitive V & A catalogue. The plumbing was authentically Georgian (i.e. there wasn’t any); and what substitutes Elgin contrived, he also spilled as he struggled in terror from his bed, to place his foot straight in it, or to retrieve a floating sandal from an overloaded receptacle. His sheets… but there are limits beyond which even the hardened ‘Baroque Realist’ falters.
To maintain the stable character of the household Elgin picked his lodgers from among a Johnsonian gathering of riffraff, not yet barred from an Islington hostelry much patronized by antique dealers (or, more accurately, ‘runners’ to antique dealers): most of whom vanished like quicksilver at close of trade, to Golders Green, Muswell Hill, or Seven Kings; or dived into back rooms to whisper with furtive connections. Some of Elgin’s boys threatened to become actors. Some ‘restored’ prints. Some fronted expense-account restaurants. All were prepared to drink. And most were, with no wild enthusiasm, homosexual in persuasion.
Neb, oddly, had not drifted in by this route. He didn’t drink: which made him immediately suspect. ‘The creature’s a soot-smeared, melon-headed Ulsterman; a horse-fucker,’ growled Elgin. ‘You’d better lock up the candles.’ But, despite the landlord’s primitive caveat, Neb had been successfully smuggled in, and established, by a props man from Sadler’s Wells; who later survived an attempted self-crucifixion on Hampstead Heath, and dined out on it through half the green rooms in Europe. Neb contrived not to be noticed. He stuck to his attic like a tame crow. He paid his rent, and he went out early. If, by some evil chance, Elgin met him on the stairs, the landlord crossed himself, spat twice on his hands, and prayed he’d be gone in the morning.