In Hyde Park, nuclear disarmers held placards like riot shields, watched by a woman, furred, pearled, indignant. She had been very tenderly feeding robins and now straightened, glowering at me. ‘Why isn’t everything cleaned up? Abroad…’ she looked wistful, almost attractive, ‘they were allowed, well… gas.’
Becoming ethnically mixed as ancient Rome or Antioch, the capital remained unknowable, often alarming. I felt panic in a subterranean car park on brooding, thinly lit levels, familiar from gangster movies, when a sudden footfall seemed gunshot; also when an inscrutable van halted alongside me, my head within range. A fruit barrow stationed near the Embassy might hide explosives, like the single boot beneath a Clapham bench. The furtive was rival government. Our shelves had catalogues of lethal inks, poisoned washing powder and vests, hollow canes, diagrams of crossed wires and inconspicuous knobs. New versions of the Hidden Hand, World Plotters, Wise Men of Zion, the Four Just Men, Professor Moriarty, once sold on railway platforms.
In this London, doorstep salesmen were suspect. In a surreptitious leaflet a turbaned head was captioned, ‘I Want Your Job, Your Woman, Your Boys.’ Strangers’ eyes could be clues in the plot: screwed hard, they menaced.
Aerosol Man sprayed silent chorus, signatures of terror. Kill for Peace, Kaffirs Out, Jewful of Greed, Fuck Work: dark passwords, though scarcely Lenin in October. How many realized danger from an Oxfordshire house where insufficient evidence protected a woman who had placed a Russian spy as a secretary within the British atomic arms organization?
Early spring. Another London uncovering itself, graceful stages of seduction. Light broadened, trees were clotted with green, feet quickened. Madame Katrina, Earl’s Court clairvoyant, foresaw that Midsummer would give me a momentous encounter. Pending this, a thick-bearded Indian in the gardens accosted me. ‘Great Britain!’ Moist brown eyes protruded, stiffened, ‘Queen, Duke. Top Grade? No.’ Then clapped hands and disappeared. Not a miraculous saviour from golden air, nevertheless, green leaf, red blossom in patrician, electronically protected Belgravia, daffodils flaunting in the Embassy garden, all signalled good fortune. Not so the sirens floating around me, always intent on someone else. Sallow girls in the tube, dark girls on grass, girls with thrilling bottoms and Arletty eyes, laughing Italians and discreet Spaniards, Bengalis gliding in saris, glistening athletic Swedes, festive American girls high on repartee, all with escorts, making for tennis, swimming or palais de dance, to jitter like crazed marmosets.
A clear eye glittered like a key, perfume lingered after she had gone, frustration smudged the wet dream. Copulations must be seething throughout April, Bacchic seizures of life, but I had to attempt solace from scents of a box hedge, at once transporting me to Mother’s rose garden, or from a disused north London railway line vanishing into tunnels, woods, into stories. Anticipating summer harlequinades, a park band restored the Europe of Strauss and Lehar, Auber and Offenbach. I was always helpless against tunes, lulling, reclining, jaunty, teasing, thumping. An old, once loved Austrian song caught my breath:
Prayers get answered, usually ironically, stamping the month like a thumb print. I needed what the English called Fun, but, in a mischievous English way, received only answer to prayer.
On broken pavement, desolate, yet within sight of St Paul’s, I found a bomb site, a jagged turmoil of bricks, rubble, rusted metal, smashed glass, befouled tins, dark filth amongst the saplings, nettles, foxgloves – puzzling nursery name – barely natural sunflowers, swollen and garish after centuries of oblivion, now lolling over slabs of stucco. The ruin must have been preserved by City speculators, though Poles or Germans could have cleared it in a fortnight. Flowers were scentless as blisters. From them rose an apparition, not slender but thin, female, in blotched jeans, hair in Medusa tangles, eyes, circled by mascara, fixed as a lip-reader’s but cat-like with spite. The face, ill or defiant, tightened. Young but not youthful, she must see a foreigner, thus more willing to pay, and finally she touched her crotch.
‘You want it, Mr Continent? To wake it up?’ A country accent, words, as it were, out of balance, scarcely comprehensible. A wraith, exhalation of another London mood, from wreckage, with sores and worse. ‘It’s safe.’ She was not urgent, merely stating, like an indifferent tourist guide. ‘I don’t scream.’
Her attempted laugh, mirthless, was yet warmer, showing teeth clean and regular as a drill squad, uncanny on the dirty face. ‘I come here with Wendy. A lush. Petal. No kids. Her tubes…’ She nodded towards a lair scooped from bricks and twigs, but did not move, as if trying to sell Wendy. ‘But the bandages on her wrists… Overdosed three times. Thrice, as they say. Got a cig? I’m strapped.’
The face minutely thickened, the eyes sickened. ‘She let the blood run into the sink, said it was Sue’s scratches, but I threw that. In the toilet, red and white. It’d scare you rotten. By all rights she’d hate me, though I can say nice things. I can say, Lampedusa. Joe Tom Lampshade. Her friend Max burnt down the Wandsworth.’
My need for flight was obstructed by scraps of ingrained courtesy. Father would have lifted his hat, Mother be grandly solicitous, opening her purse, the Herr General stand his ground, as if in a museum of objects curious but inessential.
‘Did you know, whoever you are, that the lone attacker scarcely ever threatens the underaged? That most crimes are at home? Patriarchal or otherwise.’ She lingered over this with queer pride. ‘I’d want to help, but can be insincere, wanting jam with the loaf. Bread’s something else. Sometimes I need six of the best. What are you thinking?’ I was still thinking of headlong escape, possible pursuit. Her smile ceased midway, leaving only a stare empty as a parrot’s.
As if repeating a lesson imperfectly understood, she said, ‘It’s all doubling the greengage. So he says. He likes calling it syndrome.’
A fear rippled through me, seeking the bone. Despite the undernourishment, she was wiry as gristle, a graveyard creature from German UFA movies. Speechless, I felt my head shaking, she did not shrink, merely sink back to the grit, tins, over-bright plants.
Later, in some shame, I knew that war, deaths, Meinnenberg had not left me compassionate. Possibly, my Germanic strain made me impatient of waste, the crippled, deranged, lost. I sought a forgetting and for some days muffled disquiet, even shame, in cinemas, needing Bogart’s glinty eye, Cagney’s swagger, Astaire’s electric feet and supernatural cane. Childhood fantasies, Forest Uncle, cruel but beloved, dainty swan-dancers, transmuted to Marlene’s blue, languid stare. Rita’s swirling skirt, Orson’s hauteur, Laughton’s ogreish satisfaction, spitfire women and beefsteak men careening in honky-tonk Dodge City or on the Santa Fé trail.
I still needed to share. Tortured by isolation, God must have invented the Devil. Loneliness was more fearful than the Kaplans and Miracles. Hungrily watching the noisy, bewitched young, I remembered Spender’s line, I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled.
In simplicity of genius, Stefan George began, She came alone from far away.With Suzie, I had shared Fun. Meinnenberg had permitted brief, disconcerting, impulsive comradeships, even with Greg and Trudi I had been intimate with coarse, frostbitten pasture, windy harvests, the silence of north German night. I could now only await the soothsayer’s promise.