They learned Turkish and Italian together, living on love and carrot sticks. Their daughter Stella was born to them one glorious May the 15th. But Robert carried in him what I carry too and he did not escape it. They tried everything but in the end he died before Christmas 1997. He had just completed his translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. It might almost be as though Robert’s own subtlety, that was compromised by the harm drink did him, has after death joined itself in posthumous conjunction with Flora’s own subtlety. I could not have managed my life without this strong friendship that she has thrown to me when I thought there was no one in the sea but sharks and minnows.
So somehow I ended up after Vogue working first in a joke shop and then for a decorous old-style pornographer on Old Street, which was not the fashionable area it is now. In addition to packing tired copies of Fanny Hill and trying to get off the ground a rather interesting-sounding book about the Blunt family and equine blood-lines, I ended up, thinner yet this time, and attired in white, but in rather the same situation I had found myself in at the very beginning of Vogue, ineptly laying out a magazine with scalpel, cardboard and Cow Gum, though now in a small room in Old Street with one man instead of Vogue House with all its varied and often congenial wildlife.
This time it was the AA membership magazine that I was laying out badly, the AA being a large organisation that comes to the rescue of motorists in distress and whose headquarters are in Basingstoke. My new boss, the Old Street one, who regularly paid me in cash on a Friday morning and borrowed much of it back on Friday afternoons, took me on a trip to Basingstoke. We underwent a lunch with the bigwigs from the Automobile Association in their local hostelry. Mention was made of my having worked on Vogue. This to demonstrate experience with layout. I deprecated loudly but no one was reading my body language. The AA headquarters was, at that time, one of the tallest buildings in Basingstoke and from its boardroom might be viewed the Wiggins Teape building, known locally as the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke. I laughed, then saw that my reaction was not the right one and sucked in the laugh.
I knew that I was acting and that I shouldn’t have been given the part, should never have auditioned for it. Anyone in their right mind would have sent me away as had the kind lady at Konrad Furs in South Molton Street, who simply said, when I went in there and asked for a job, ‘Do you really think you’re suitable, dear? Aren’t you a bit over-qualified? How much do you know about selecting pelts?’
Out beyond the edges of Basingstoke, a town that grew almost as one watched it, were roundabouts, aspin with vehicles, their owners very likely members themselves of the AA. Our presentation having been accepted, we were appointed designers to the Automobile Association of their monthly magazine. Going down in the lift, my boss said, ‘Seems a pity all that land being built on around Basingstoke. Still, you’ve got to put people somewhere and it’s as good a place as any.’ And so I got the layout job for the AA. The prefiguring of my being practically laid out before I got to the other kind of AA is not too neat to be true.
I stayed with this job for about a year, my ineptitude in most areas outstripped by that of my boss, over whom there was a Mr Big of whose visits I lived in fear. In another part of the building, doing I do not know what, worked a tired-looking man named Mr Bunce, whose assistant Nanette came in one day with what looked very like a broken jaw. The one solid benefit of the job was that opposite the office there was that beautiful repository for the dead, Bunhill Fields, where I walked when I could, reading the stones.
But by now I was learning to take a certain amount of care of myself. Our lugubrious next-door neighbour in Warwick Avenue, Tobias Rodgers, a dealer in Spanish incunabula, threw a tablecloth over his ping-pong table and had a party. At this party I enjoyed a conversation about Hogarth, about building wooden ships, about the deliciousness of non-fizzy Champagne, about how weird it was to be the only Jewish family in your small town in New England. I had met the man who was to stop me going out dressed inappropriately, make me eat more sensibly, and show me, in the Cosy Fish and Supper Bar in Whitecross Street, opposite my workplace in Old Street, how to eat a gherkin properly. For a start it was called a pickle. His band was called The Forbidden and their number ‘Ain’t Doin’ Nothin” was number forty-three in the New Wave charts. His nom de guerre was Jet Bronx. He is now more ordinarily known as Loyd Grossman.
As we worked on this chapter together and I gradually lost sight, Liv and I speculated as to what lies at the root of the changes that dictate fashion. I said to her that I’d always thought of it in two ways; that, as it were, there might be a cobalt mountain somewhere and therefore, to keep to cobalt prices high, blue must be the colour for the coming season. So I’d thought of it visually, the colours laid out as you see great heaps of pigment in soft triangles set in low brass bowls at the roadside in India.
The other way I’d thought of it is as an enormous sneeze of influence, so that everyone under the age of forty suddenly thinks that she has invented the notion of edging a cardigan with velvet or pinning an outsized rose on to her lapel. The great trick is the usual one with capitalism: how to make everyone feel that they are expressing their individual self by purchasing the very same thing as many millions of others. Who are the great sneezers of influence? People imagine that it is the fashion editors, but I think the truth is more mysterious and lies deep at the root of the levels of discontent with themselves that are imposed upon women and that we embrace with such delight and appetite.
I had, in London, broadly, two milieux when I first arrived there in 1976: homosexual men and grown-ups. Of course they often overlapped. The first world set me at my ease when I talked, as the purely heterosexual world did not quite. Drawn as I was to art historians, architectural historians and painters, I found myself often the only girl in a room. I was fond of dancing and with my close friend James Fergusson, an individual of impeccably sober mien, antiquarian bookseller and revolutionary of the newspaper obituary, I used to jump about a lot in gay clubs. Jamie is entirely of the marrying kind and I have the privilege of being godmother to his daughter Flora, who would be horrified to see how her father and I, whose common ground is fundamentally bookish and topographical since we are both Scots with a close interest in stone carving and every matter of calligraphy, font or letterpress, cut capers in the Embassy Club, Country Cousin and other dives. The other thing we did by night was drive in James’s Mini-Clubman van, looking at churches and the streets of the City. On these drives I would come closer to understanding my father’s detailed love of London.
What was I living on during these days? I sold a lot of my clothes, I didn’t eat unless I was taken out, I had a little overdraft, and I got mortifying jobs. I ghosted two books and modelled for Levi’s Jeans. It is a nice point that my first husband’s second wife was auditioned for the Levi’s job, but her bottom wasn’t big enough. I was conscious that I was wasting time and that I should be spending my days accumulating and building words or else teaching in some context or another. I wrote tiny pieces for the TLS, the Spectator, anyone that would have me. Essentially, these publications were doing me favours. I had no sense of building a career. I was flashy-looking but recessive.