There is an enfilade, falling, snowing, with whitewash, of mirrors laughing thinly into one another, the panelling tactfully bracketing itself around each tall looking-glass. The ceiling asks for chan deliers but incompletion is the keynote. How to describe it? Perhaps if Ely Cathedral grew like an opening stone rose and softly half fell down…?
In this house, at the age of fifty, one night in 2005 I listened out for hornets in my bedroom. I knew I had to change my life before I lost it. A wasp will kill me, but hornets carry more poison, so I’d die sooner. I know, because I was stung by an orange hornet the size of a conker at sea just off Tahiti and that was nearly it for me, before even marrying for the first time. My then fiancé whizzed me by rubber boat into hospital and by the time we arrived my arm was a washing-up glove full of jelly.
Decades on, I waited for hornets, standing with a shoe in my right hand in the hortensia-wallpapered room in the hot Gascon night. The small double bed was occupied by the semicircular body of my then companion. Marcel contemplates the sleeping body of Albertine in like pose, reflecting on the infinitude of traits one human soul may possess.
Such was nowhere near my reflection that night. I knew that to be anything like truthful or kind, I had to get away while there was still time for him to locate another comforter, before I turned on him for nothing worse than his own fulsome nature.
It was nothing anybody said save he himself. It would take Proust’s cumulative genius to show how, feeling himself closest to truth, he most lied. To be with him through time was to see through him like a hoop. So, a profession can take the soul. It was politics that he professed.
In fewer than three months’ time, I shall leave this flat for, as its delicate state attests, it is in need of structural and architectural attention. Its ceilings sag a bit, its draughts are tempestuous, and aspects of its layout, although I have come to love them, are certainly dated. Liv and I get our fizzy drinks from a suavely concealed mirrored wall that you press and it magically opens to reveal a cocktail niche. There is a flip-over serving counter for when the studio was in use for private views in the seventies. There is a door into the studio that obviates the necessity of entering the artist’s private apartment, a system put in place for Sargent. The colours, that will of necessity have to go, are kind to pictures, ranging from every kind of dove grey through to lichenous greens and, in my bedroom, a colour that combines pink, blue, brown, grey, white and black and yet is very light; the colour of the gill of the smallest, freshest, field mushroom. The sitting room, that we call Henry James, might be any colour. It is the colour of memory, a tactful background, a recessive, becoming, dark but festive, shade, making everything hung upon it look better.
Five or so years before his death, the owner of this flat sustained a stroke that made movement difficult, although it did not stop him painting. In order to help him remain independent, banisters and grabs were installed exactly as though it had been a ship. They save me from sinking.
I could have done with more of those grabs, on a metaphysical level, when I was at Cambridge. I did not know that there lay within me a thirst nothing could quench that would nearly kill me. There were signs, but they were illegible to me and my friends at the time.
My room at Girton was called F6; it took some ascending to. I was next to a popular girl whose parents visited most weekends bringing lox and bagels. I was very grateful one Sunday when the mother of this family gave me a bagel, stuffed full. Some kind of fear set in. I did not understand how to get out of one’s room except to go to the college library or for meals in hall. I knew that when women were first up at university they joined one another for intense conversation over mugs of hot chocolate. I had two mugs, so that was a start. Further research revealed a row of three baths, each in its cubicle and each the size of a lifeboat, so I spent a good deal of my first year at Girton just sitting in the bath reading and getting wrinkly. I was an unreliable and irresponsible student, having come straight from school where, during the last term that Katie and Rosa were there, I had worked as a housemaid and kitchen maid, because I had got into Cambridge before my A levels, didn’t want to be separated from them and needed to earn money. It was interesting to see the modification of girls’ behaviour towards me as I changed from senior to skivvy. Mrs Rock, the house cook, was kind to this unhelpful pair of hands and gave me jobs she knew I could do like emptying the commercial dishwasher, grating fifteen pounds of cheese, or slicing ox liver and onions for fifty-six people with a knife whose steel was whippy, sharp and thin as a line.
The school train started at Waterloo and ended at Sherborne. For some happy reason, one summer day when we were in our A-level year, it dawdled at Basingstoke. We were told that we might go and purchase refreshments at the station buffet. We were not yet changed into our school uniform, and no one in their right mind would want to challenge Katie’s raised eyebrow. We purchased two pork pies and two miniatures of brandy. Brandy is rage and turmoil to me, gin the taste of isolation.
Otherwise strong drink hardly made its appearance at Sherborne, though there was a rebarbative cocktail offered by the headmistress to those girls considered made of the right stuff to meet visiting preachers such as Sir Robert Birley, formerly headmaster of Charterhouse and Eton. Katie and I were chosen for this privilege and liked him a lot. Neither of us felt the same about Dame Diana’s refreshing sherry, tomato and orange juice cocktail that was the speciality at White Lodge, the headmistress’s house.
In the first weeks at Girton, should someone have asked me what was wrong, I would have replied that I was simultaneously anxious and bored. I seemed frozen to the spot. I couldn’t leave my room. In my room was a bottle of sherry. Everyone knew that undergraduates offered one another small glasses of sherry. I drank the bottle on my own and went to sleep. I imagine that this sleep will have been the first blackout of my life, and that having glimpsed this option, my brain’s biochemistry was on the very tentative lookout for more.
There was a bus that took Girtonians into town for lectures and seminars. I ended up sleeping on the floors of my patient friends, Anthony Appiah the most patient of all, playing me his records of Marlene and Mahler and Noël Coward and allowing me to cramp his love life.
Of course there were some friends from school. Edward Stigant, descendant of the Archbishop Stigand on the Bayeux Tapestry, was reading History at Christ’s under Professor Jack Plumb. Edward looked like a very naughty Russian girl. He had the profile and eyelashes of a Borzoi and was short, lissom and bendy. His gift with languages was prodigious. When we did our examinations for Oxford and/or Cambridge, which were in those days separate from A levels, there was a translation paper from which you had to choose two longish passages from among a dozen or so languages to translate into English. Edward had done them all, with time to spare, and waltzed off with a scholarship. This took courage. His older brother had earlier achieved distinction at the same college and taken his own life while still at university.
Edward did not live very much longer than that brother, but oh the delightful nuisance he caused in his life. He was completely kind and, of course, when we first met at the school classics club, ‘The Interpretes’, which was a decorous means of meeting boys, I lapped him up. He was having an affair with a Turkish air stewardess at the time. This strange reversion to what might be thought of as deviancy in the context of someone quite so camp, also struck him during the week of our Finals, when he fell head over heels in love with a magnificent girl, and sent her a dozen red roses every single day. They both emerged with congratulatory firsts.