He thought he heard a muffled voice saying ‘Come in’ but he couldn’t be sure. He knocked again. This time the voice bellowed.
‘Entrez. Avanti. Kommen sie in. Entrada. Get a grip. Come bloody in.’
He did. The first impression he had was a smell. It was the smell of oil paint. Several canvases were stacked in the dim hall. He negotiated them respectfully and looked in the door of the living-room. What he saw was to stay with him — ‘like a picture of a place where I wanted to live. I was looking at where I somehow wanted to be.’
Sunshine made a window of light on the floor. The room was shabby and poorly furnished but the effect wasn’t depressing. The place for him had a romantic dignity imparted to it by the unknown lives that had passed through. There were more paintings scattered around the room, resting in groups against the walls. There were piles of books on the floor. A young man sat with his back towards the living-room doorway, leaning sideways so that he was profiled against the window. It was a striking profile. He was leafing through a book. An attractive girl sat in the chair opposite, her face towards the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. Neither of them seemed to be aware of David Ewart’s presence. That impressed him.
‘I mean, I had just knocked at the door. And they seemed to have forgotten already. I could’ve been robbing the place for all they knew. They had a kind of animal preoccupation. The way a cat might glance at you if you try to catch its attention. But you won’t seriously disturb it. It goes back to what it was concentrating on. I don’t know. It was just the natural rightness of where they were, what they were doing. I wanted to live with that kind of assurance.’
The man stopped turning the pages. He read carefully for a moment. He held up his finger, though the girl’s eyes remained closed.
‘This is the bit,’ he said.
He read aloud a brief passage from the book. David Ewart could never remember afterwards what the words had been saying. He had never found the book from which the passage came. He regretted that. It was as if he had been listening to the password to where they were, a password he had never learned. The girl didn’t open her eyes.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘Maybe? Nobody could say it as well as that if it wasn’t true.’
David Ewart walked into the living-room. The man looked up.
‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘The ghost of freshers past.’
The girl opened her eyes. They were blindingly blue.
‘David Ewart,’ the man said, pointing. ‘Sorry. I’m Scott Laidlaw. Some welcome that. I’m sorry.’ They were shaking hands. ‘We thought you were just some of the through traffic we get here. This is Hester.’
He gave her surname but David Ewart couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t remember very clearly much that followed. What remained with him was a sense of excitement. His memory of the circumstances that generated it was fragmentary. Hester showed him round the flat. Scott made coffees for them. He learned that Hester was at Art School as well with one year still to go.
‘She paints any surface she can find,’ Scott said. ‘Stick out your tongue and she paints it.’
‘I could do a mural on yours then.’
Someone came in who was called Sandy. He was studying medicine. His course wasn’t finished and he was going to move in with Hester. Scott Laidlaw had introduced them. Somebody else came in who was called Dave. (‘I remember that because it was the same name as mine.’) He couldn’t remember their second names. The fourth person who was sharing the flat was studying English. He didn’t appear. His first name was mentioned to Dave Ewart several times but it was long gone.
The atmosphere became that of an impromptu party. People were teasing Scott about being the only one who still had some stuff to move out. Derogatory remarks were made about his paintings. He said they would fetch millions in years to come. They held a mock showing of them for David Ewart. He liked them. His valuation was significantly higher than the prices the others put on them. In celebration of having found an appreciative patron at last (‘Do you mind if I call you Theo?’), Scott collected an amazing hoard of empty bottles from a cupboard. He and David Ewart got the money back on the empties and brought three bottles of suicidally cheap wine back to the flat. The party moved up a gear.
‘That first glass of wine was terrible. But the atmosphere of the place did something to it. It refermented into vintage in the bottle. See the third glass? Nectar, nectar.’
There was a lot of laughter. They formed a solemn committee to decide upon the fate of Scott’s remaining property, since he was apparently notorious for his sentimental attachment to places, his inability to leave when his time was up. It seemed to be a seriously entertained possibility that his books and pictures would become a permanent fixture here.
‘I can be nostalgic for half-an-hour ago,’ he said.
A bonfire was mooted. A pavement sale. Oxfam. (‘What do you have against Oxfam?’) Finally, it was agreed that Dave’s uncle would collect the stuff in his van the next day. Hester and Sandy would store it till Scott could retrieve it.
‘Otherwise,’ Hester said, ‘he’ll never move it. He was supposed to be packing these books today. So what does he do? He starts reading them.’
‘I was packing them,’ Scott said. ‘In the mind.’
Happy insults flew back and forward like thrown knives which the recipients always seemed to catch by the handle and return. David Ewart enjoyed being a part of it. He even joined in the singing. By the time he was leaving, he had decided this was where he would be living, even if it was just to share in the ghost of this ambience, which he loved. He was ceremonially given a key.
‘I had an uncle and auntie who lived in Rutherglen. I was staying the night there. They all chipped in with the best way to get there. Scott walked me to the corner. I remember him waving. He looked to me like a sailor with a lot of voyages ahead of him. I envied him the things that he might see, the possibilities he had.’
Reaching Rutherglen, David Ewart was light-headed with more than the wine. He liked the people who welcomed him but the evening passed him by like a distant parade. He was still full of where he had been, still hearing the laughter, still seeing the faces. Everything else seemed colourless beside them.
‘You ever see The Taming of the Shrew? The film? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The two young men at the beginning. Burton and Michael York, was it? They come into. . Padua? Anyway. The beginning of that picture. The first few scenes. I loved them. The place is just bursting with life. And there’s people everywhere. And noise. And. . I don’t know. I can’t remember. But chickens being sold or something. There’s just so much happening. And the two of them are all over the place. Laughing. And drinking it in. They’re eating everything with their eyes. I could tell what they were feeling. I knew what they were feeling. Because it’s what I felt that night. It’s the feeling of beginnings. Beginnings are beautiful. Aren’t they? It’s the feeling that everything is possible. That night I felt the terrifying energy of a new generation. And I knew that I was part of it. I knew that everything was possible.’
He had been sitting in his pottery when he said that, turning his empty coffee-cup slowly in his hands like a crystal ball that had gone opaque. He looked too young to be so old. He stared up at me, searching for what I couldn’t give him.
‘And it was,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it? What happened? I mean, I remember that time. That’s just sixteen years ago. Maybe the Yellow Submarine had sunk. But we still had dreams we shared that were worth dreaming. Dreams that made you worthy of being human. Now if you want to dream them still, you dream alone. The communal dreams? You buy them in a fucking supermarket.’