Saturday 24 January 2015

Holiday VIII: On the way home

   On the way back from our holiday we made two stops.  Our first port-of-call was the 'Sainsbury's Centre for the Visual Arts' at The University of East Anglia just on the western edge of Norwich.  This was our first visit.
   The centre was established in 1973 as a permanent home for the collections of Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury - a mixture of twentieth century Western art and art and antiquities from around the globe, as well as the ceramics collected by Lisa Sainsbury alone.  In addition it also houses the Anderson Art Nouveau Collection and the UEA collection of 'Abstract and Constructivist Art, Design and Architecture', (as well as couple of university faculties).  All together making one of the most impressive university art collections in the country.  In 1974 it was decided to commission a gallery to house this abundance of riches.  And the result was Norman Foster's first public work.




   We were busy bees that morning, not only loosing ourselves in the permanent collections, but we had a look at all four temporary exhibitions. 
   The two that interested me most were a selection of items from the Art Nouveau collection, and 'Reality: Modern and Contemporary British paintings', an overview of the continuing presence in British art of realism.  There were representative works by Bacon, Freud, Hockney, Lowry and George Shaw amongst others.  It was all perhaps a little diffuse, not possibly helped by the layout of the exhibition which was in a series of spaces often at a distance from each other.  The problem was however, that the realist presence in British Art itself a massive and incoherent conglomeration of artists and approaches that perhaps to try and corral it all into one exhibition was a tall order.  One glaring thing for me was the juxtaposition of such varying talents, some of it utterly sublime others bathetic.   The highlights were a monumental Freud, and a couple of George Shaw.  I found that after all, I like Lowry.  Complaints aside I think it serves (it's still on until March) to highlight an artistic approach that is often neglected in the media.  I should add that I was surprised not to see any work by Michael Andrews and John Wonnacot, who both worked in the city in the 1970s teaching at the Art College.  But as they both share a retrospective at the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in the city centre their absence is understandable.  Dare I call them the 3rd Norwich School?

   We stopped for lunch in East Dereham, a small market town a few miles west of Norwich;  the church was unfortunately locked, but I took these images of the outside which boasts a Holy Well, and a detached bell tower, which is a bit of a rare thing these days but was rather more common in the Middle Ages, for example Westminster Abbey, St Paul's, Norwich and Salisbury Cathedrals all had detached towers for bells.  Dereham was the site of an early Anglo-Saxon monastery and is associated with St Withburga, daughter of King Anna of the East Angles.  So its sanctity is ancient.




Sunday 18 January 2015

Holiday VII: St Benet's Abbey and the Ranworth Rood Screen

   On the final full day of our holiday we went west into the Broads.  We parked up at the rather suburban looking South Walsham Broad and walked along the Fleet Dike to see the ruins of St Benet's Abbey.  The remains of abbey were a favourite with Romantic artists such as Cotman, and were included in John Betjeman's 1974 documentary, 'A Passion For Churches', which was as much about Norfolk as it was the diocese of Norwich. (Produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, who was also responsible for Betjeman's 'Metro-land' of 1973.) Quite good reasons then for a long, cold muddy trek into the marshes!

     "I hear a deep sad undertow in bells which calls the Middle Ages back to me. From Prime to Compline the monastic hours echo in bells along the windy marsh and fade away. They leave me to the ghosts which seem to look from this enormous sky upon the ruins of a grandeur gone. St Benet's Abbey by the river Bure, now but an arch way and a Georgian mill. A lone memorial of the cloistered life."





   We then stopped off at the 'Fairhaven Woodland and Water Gardens', the creation of Major Henry Boughton.  Major Boughton was the younger brother of the 1st Lord Fairhaven, who lived at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire mentioned elsewhere in this blog and where the bf works.

   Our final visit of the day was to Ranworth and one of the great pieces of English late Medieval art, the Ranworth Rood Screen.  I'm tempted to call it a prime example, along with the Despencer Retable, of the 1st Norwich School; certainly it was painted locally.  The importance lies not only in its design but that so many of the painted panels survived the Reformation in such good nick.  A marvel.






Monday 12 January 2015

Holiday IV: The Nelson Column, Great Yarmouth

   Great Yarmouth sits on a spit of land, with the North Sea on the east and the river Yare on the west and south.  Towards the southern tip of the peninsular, amongst industrial units and workshops and parked cars stands the Nelson Column.  It is in the strictest Neo-classicism; erected in 1817 by the County of Norfolk to commemorated the county's most famous son, at 144 feet it is a foot shorter than the much more famous column erected to Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square.  It possesses an austere, masculine beauty, that is perhaps contrasted by the upper stage of graceful caryatids.  Looking again at the photos as I write this post I am struck by the funereal feel of the architecture; as though the steps in the lower picture lead not a spiral staircase but a burial chamber with a gleaming granite sarcophagus.  Having said that, everything about this structure is, as one would expect from  Neo-classicism, impeccable - from the lettering of the inscriptions down to the blue painted railings.  Superb.  It should be better known.  When built the column sat in the midst of open land - land owned by the Admiralty, so it was thought a fitting place.  In the summer it is open to the public.





Saturday 10 January 2015

Holiday V: St Nicholas, Great Yarmouth

     I thought I'd give this church a post all it's own.  I think there's some debate as to whether this is the largest parish church in England or not.  Either way it's a huge building, a big boned sort of thing.  It sits in a sort of hollow, kind of tucked away, below the level of the surrounding streets, so that for all its bulk it isn't that prominent in the townscape.  Like the town around it St Nicholas's was badly damaged in World War II.  It was rebuilt under the guidance of Stephen Dykes Bower, and he did a brilliant job, though sadly the spire on the central tower was not rebuilt.  Stephen Dykes Bower has been called the last Gothic Revivalist, and he certainly carried the torch forward through the twentieth century.  I've always thought of him as somewhat thwarted because in a lot of the things he did, particularly the rebuilding of war damaged churches, he was hampered by the general lack of cash in post-war Britain.  He ploughed a lonely furrow too, as architectural tastes in Britain turned toward Modernism.



     The West Front.  It reminds me of the Heiligen Geist Hospital in Lübeck, but the similarity must be purely coincidental. Surely?


     To unify the interior Dykes Bower reduced the number of piers in the nave arcades designing new ones in Transitional Gothic.  The nave is narrower than the aisles.  Note the pale colours, the light fittings and the boarded ceilings; all very Dykes Bower.


     Dykes Bower designed a whole range of fittings for the church, the most prominent is the organ case in the north transept, and my favourite the wrought iron rejas of the south chancel chapel.  The wooden things such as the pews, and altar rails are of limed oak.  The colour is concentrated at the east end, where the ceilings are coloured and gilded and there is colour too from contemporary stained glass and the damask of the altar cloths





Monday 5 January 2015

Holiday III Great Yarmouth

   A bitterly cold day, as I remember it, with occasional heavy showers.  A day in which I was never quite warm or dry; or so I remember it.  We started the day with a walk to the beach to watch the seals - it was calving season and there were plenty of white pups about.  After breakfast we drove south through sprawling seaside development to....well, firstly the scanty remains of the Roman fort at Caister on Sea, and then to the later fortifications at Caister Castle, the home of Sir John Falstoff (one time owner of Blickling, and model for Falstaff in 'Henry V')


   And then Great Yarmouth, a bustling port and seaside resort, with a down-at-heal air.  Architecturally there is a lot to see - the heart of the town is, or was Medieval, and there are Georgian merchants houses lining the quayside.  There is an enormous Market Place, and an incredible, severest Neo-Classical honorific column erected to commemorate one of Britain's greatest military heroes Admiral Lord Nelson. But like the majority of Britain's larger towns the 20th & 21st centuries have been unkind. Yarmouth was bombed in the last War, and then underwent a series of, perhaps, well meant redevelopments that have scarred the ancient core of the town.  It must have been very beautiful at one time, alas a lot of the historic properties, particularly the mighty houses on South Quay were in semi derelict condition.  The one bright spot was the former St George's church which had been derelict for some time and has now found a new lease of life as a theatre.  One of the reasons I wanted to visit was to pay a return visit to the ancient parish church, St Nicholas, but more of that in my next post. 
   Being a seaside town we had walk along the prom, eat fish and chips (very good) and buy rock.  We really had to.  Really. There was good early Victorian architecture in places too along the prom, in what is in effect a separate town.


White Horse Plain


Houses on Church Plain

The Fisherman's Almshouses (1702) on Church Plain


The Tolhouse


St George, St George's Plain


   That evening we watched 'Les Biches' a film by Claude Chabrol, starring his wife Stephane Audran.  The reason for watching this for me was Audran; I have been quietly fascinated by her for years.  I first remember seeing her in Granda TV's superlative adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited' where she played Lord Marchmain's mistress 'Cara'.  I next saw her in 'Babette's Feast'.  Audran possessed a remarkable and striking beauty, and an almost other-worldly acting style.  Her performance in this film did not disappoint either; written by her husband and Paul Gegauf it is the story of a strange, disturbing relationship between Frederique (Audran), the younger enigmatic Why (Jacqueline Sassard) and the architect Paul Thomas played by Jean-Louis Trintignant.  The film itself had this slightly distanced feel hard to capture in words.  Initially set in Paris, where the stylish, dominant  Frederique picks up Why on the Pont des Arts, things begin to go awry when Frederique brings the younger, seemingly ingenue, woman south with her to her villa in Provence where they encounter Paul and a sort of three way relationship develops.  The denouement, a 'sort of denouement' really as it throws up all sorts of questions, occurs back in Paris.

Les Biches
1968

Producer                Andres Genoves
Director                  Claude Chabrol
Cinematographer  Jean Rabier

Sunday 4 January 2015

Chameleon

I originally started this blog to highlight my novel 'Chameleon' in the hope of attracting attention from would-be agents and publishers.  Not that it worked!  Things have changed somewhat since then, as I seem to blog about anything that interests me whether it's Kate Bush, or cinema, or interior design.  I have catholic tastes, as you can tell.  Time perhaps then to return to its original purpose.  Here is the first chapter of 'Chameleon'....


      The news came quickly - that is before it got into the media.  It was Monday evening - early on, about six - and I was alone in the flat waiting for Tom to return with a take-away – Chinese, I think – when the phone rang.  It was my mother.
      We exchanged the usual pleasantries, the usual platitudes, but I could tell from the tone of her voice and her hesitant sentences that something was wrong; I could even see her empty hand toying with the flex, twisting the beige plastic around her thin, dry fingers.
      “Alex,” she said after a pause that for her was a summoning up of strength.  “It’s Jason.  He’s been killed.  In a road accident.”
      Across the street the setting sun was gilding the windows and blushing the stucco.  Through the open window the sounds of London - passing traffic and voices and the ever-present hum of the city - flooded the sitting room in waves.
      “Alex?”  I became aware of my mother’s voice in my right ear.  “Alex, are you still there?”
      I murmured something, a response of sorts.  I really didn’t want to be bothered with her at that moment, what with her questions and her concern.  Not satisfied, she asked me is I was ‘all right’.  I gave her some feeble, clichéd answer I can’t recall now but which seemed to satisfy her.  Then, as if in response to my fears, as though she could for once read my mind, she told me what happened.
      “He was coming back from Stannington early Sunday morning with some friends.  They’d gone out for the evening, to a birthday party, I think.  I don’t know if you knew them?”
      She reeled off a trio of names, only two of whom I casually knew.  I didn’t care for his friends and avoided them.
      “Apparently Jason was in the front passenger seat.  His father said he didn’t stand a chance.  He was dead on the scene; it hit a telegraph pole.  I’m sorry.”
      A car, I thought, a car was fine.  It was a relief.
      “Mr Roberts came round this morning to tell us, on the way to the Coroners.  I was about to go shopping.  I do think it was good of Mr Roberts to think of you at time like this, don’t you agree?”
      “Jason and I were close,” I answered blandly, trying not to show the relief – a car, nothing would be said about that.
      “He was a good friend to you.”
      I agreed.
      We both let a long, awkward silence spool out between us like slack cable.  Eventually I asked her when the funeral was.
      “Mr Roberts said something about next Monday, a week today,” she answered cautiously.  “It depends when they release Jason’s body.  Anyway there’ll be a notice in Friday’s paper apparently.  I’ll check and phone you.”
      The entry phone rang.  As we said ‘goodbye’ I decided to go home on Friday. She sounded surprised, momentarily confused, by this, but the phone rang again - you could hear the impatience - and before she had time to gather her thoughts I apologised and hung up.
      It was Tom at the front door; he’d forgotten to take my keys with him.  I let him in and waited for him, pacing the length of the meagre, grey hall - Jason’s cold body being carried on a stretcher by two ambulance men, his face covered with a blanket – Tom’s footsteps echoed on the empty staircase - the ambulance drove off into the night, without lights or siren - there was no need, he was dead - my hand hung on the latch ready until Tom’s shadow appeared on the ribbed glass of the door.  I let him in.  He carried twin carrier bags of thick brown paper - there were Chinese characters scrawled on one of them in black felt tip, I remember - and he had a sheepish, embarrassed-looking home-boy grin that instantly evaporated when we spoke.  I can’t remember now what he did with the bags only that suddenly his hands were drawing me close into the dark, shadowy orbit of his body, and he was asking ‘what was wrong’.
      “I’ve just had my Mum on the phone,” I heard myself say.  “It’s this friend of mine.  Jason….you know, I’ve told you about him” I added after a pause that for me too was a summoning of strength, and then I quoted to him her bald statement of his death almost verbatim.  He murmured a few oddly hesitant words of consolation, the sort I’d heard before on TV, but then who does have the self-awareness to be eloquent at a moment like that?  And kissing me, and with his hand still on my shoulder, he led me through to the kitchen.
      It was a small, crowded sort of room; the air glutinous with heat.  There was washing up drying beside the sink.  Sunlight filtered through the Venetian blind dropping lines of powdery light on to the blue and cream floor.  The table itself was only half set, abandoned when the phone rang – knives and forks sat in a heap waiting to be assigned a place.  I fumbled blindly with the cutlery, trying to lay the table, but he stopped me.  Taking my hands in his sat me down and then quietly, without asking, he filled my plate and we began to eat.
       We were quiet at first – awkward really.  Outside though there was bird song, and children playing in back gardens.  I kept my head down over my plate intent only on the food, neither of us knowing how to deal with what had happened - until a little way into the meal Tom remembered the wine, his contribution to dinner, cooling in the fridge.  I watched him, as though from behind glass, as he uncorked the bottle and poured the wine.  He slid the glass across the uneven tabletop towards me, its pale contents swirling and glinting, and he flashed me the slightest of smiles.  I drank it down it like water but, like the food, the wine carried no pleasure, no taste.
      “I’ve never lost a friend,” he said.  “Or even a close family member for that matter, I guess I’ve been lucky in that respect.”
      “Me too,” I said.  “Until now.  I wasn’t prepared; but then I don’t suppose you ever can be.”
      Jason had sat at this table once - used these same knives, forks, spoons, just like Tom, just like all of my boyfriends had at some time.  The last time he was here, about six months ago now – one of the last times I ever saw him in fact - he stood by the window, drinking lager from a green bottle and looking like a premiership footballer - sharp suit and spiked hair, silver jewellery and mid-winter tan – the premature emblems of his success.  There was even a hint of foundation on his face.  He had been at a studio in Soho that afternoon doing some publicity shots, he said.  The press were already talking about him as the ‘next Beckham’.
      He took me out that night.  He talked incessantly in the taxi; he told me ‘life was good’.  We went to two bars and a restaurant, places that featured in the colour supplements, where he showed off his hard and gleaming sophistication.
      Tom pushed away his empty plate. “That wasn’t too bad” he said, stretching a little in his chair with satisfaction.  “Perhaps not the best I’ve ever eaten but not bad.  And you’re looking better for something to eat; you’ve regained your colour.  You looked so pale when I came back.  Soon as I saw I knew there was something wrong.”
      It was true.  Nourished by the food and relaxed by the wine I felt calmer; my hands had ceased their mild shaking.
      “It was a hell of a shock for you.”
      I agreed, but felt there was little more I could say.
      He drained the last of his wine before refilling both our glasses, muttering something about it being a crap day for both of us.  Another drink was what we deserved, he said: ‘and a further couple of bottles’.  And all the time as he spoke I played with the remaining food on my plate, drawing the last of the pale yellow rice up into a neat little pile with my fork.
      Tom stood up, scraping his chair over the lino, and began to clear away the dinner things.
      “I know that this isn’t really the time to ask, but I gotta go to Zurich in three weeks’ time.  There’s this pan-European conference.  It’s a three day job; Wednesday through Friday.  Thankfully I don’t have to give a presentation this time.  We could spend the weekend together.  Think about it.  I’ll pay; it’s not a problem.”
      He was scraping the leftovers into the bin, and I was wiping the table, when suddenly music started from below us - jazz, by the sound of it.  My neighbours were having a party.
      “Hell, we were meant to be going out this evening, weren’t we?  I’d forgotten all about it.  Alex, you still wanna go?”
      It was my night off – my first since Pride, two days before.  At the time I was continuing with my shifts at a bar in the village until I started my new job in an advertising agency in three weeks.  It was only to pay the rent and keep me in petrol.  We were planning to go to the party whose conversation now drifted intermittently up with the music, on the hot, still air, and then on to meet two of my flat mates - Jamie and Rob - at ‘The Yard’.
      “Sorry Tom, it doesn’t seem….how’s it put?….Appropriate.  It doesn’t seem appropriate.”  It was the sort of word my father used with his clients.
      Tom nodded and filled the sink to do the washing up.  He looked relieved, really.  He was looking rather tired.
      It was getting gloomy in the kitchen now.  I went over to the window, pulled up the blind and looked out over the back gardens: down there to my left were random flashes of white and colour between the dark leaves as guests moved about the party.  There was laughter, great peels of it, and Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Mac the Knife’.  No, not really appropriate at all, I thought.
      The sun was edging down towards eye level, pale and dull in the dirt grey sky.  Perhaps there would be a storm.  Soon the sun would clip the roof of the terrace across the gardens and the evening steal up the wall and into the kitchen; it was already about, edging forward from its hiding places, creeping out over the gardens and smothering the lawns in its darkness.
      “My brothers and I had to take it in turns to do the washing up when we were younger.  It was one of those tasks Dad set us to make sure we earned our allowance.  It’s alright - it wasn’t as onerous as it sounds.  We had a dish washer.  All any of us had to do was load and unload it.  And press the right button.”
      He let the water out of the sink.  There was a sort of relief in the banality of his story.
      “It was one of those things he insisted upon,” he continued.  It was better for us, so he said.  He didn’t want the family affluence to go to our heads.”
      He was smiling a little as he spoke, showing those even, perfect teeth of his.  And I forgot Jason.

      Alone in the sitting room, while Tom made coffee, I remembered the photographs.  They lay unordered in a cardboard box (decorated with architectural prints and tiny gold stars) that sat out of the way of the sun on the chest of the drawers in my bedroom.
      “I thought you might want to see some pictures of Jason,” I said when Tom came into the room with the tray. 
      The ones I could remember were there, and several I had forgotten about.  Most of them were no good, not fit for the purpose; either Jason was too small in the frame, or out of focus.  But I knew there were about half a dozen that showed him in close up, and it was those I showed Tom as we sat on the sofa drinking coffee.  
      The two of them had never met, and I wanted in Tom handling something - something beyond mere cutlery - that Jason had touched to be some kind of physical link between them; a continuity, like a baton passed between athletes, that was neither just my body nor my memories.  It was a stupid idea really, a thin excuse to do something for my own benefit; I needed a fixative for my memories of Jason and some act of remembrance, I now understand, something almost penitential to appease my guilt for having forgotten him so easily.
      Five photographs - five meagre fragments of a life - without any order or meaning but for my interpretation; not enough for a stranger to construct a biography, but from them I could map out our friendship.
      “That’s him.” I said.
      Tom took a closer look; his body pressing close into mine as he did so, tilting the photo, and the others in turn, toward the window to catch the evening light.
      There was an immediacy to that first image that was startling and that I hadn’t quite got over since I found it.  Although it was really a portrait of us both – him and I standing together, a head and torso shot, his arm across my shoulder pulling me protectively into him - Jason dominated; his smile radiated out from the picture.  Stripped of the superfluous - he was wearing a bright orange shirt that hugged his hard, assertive body like it was his own skin, his hair was shaved down to almost nothing, a pair of sunglasses sat pushed up on to his forehead - he was looking directly at the camera cockily demanding attention, like some imagined East End wide boy.  And there was more; seeing this image after so long I detected something new, something proprietorial in his attitude to me, something challenging to the viewer, or perhaps, the photographer
      “He was a fine looking guy.  Where was it taken?” Tom asked.  “Pride?”
      I had to laugh.
      “It’s my parents’ back garden.  We were at one of their barbeques.  Mum and dad hold a couple each summer, just for family and friends.  They’re quite a social thing.  That guy in the white shirt - standing there to the right, over my shoulder – yes him.  That’s Scott, my brother.  My mum took it; that’s why it’s in focus.  I’m not much of a photographer, I’m afraid.”
      I handed Tom the next photo: “See what I mean”
      Dressed in a white cotton T-shirt and blue denims - ‘boot cut’, he always wore boot cut jeans - Jason sat alone on a bench in his back garden.  The details were out of focus; his grin smeared, his eyes dark impenetrable smudges, but it was just possible, even then, to detect that ease he had before the camera.
      Tom passed the image by.
      “This one here….his mum took this one.  She didn’t want it in the end so I had it.  That’s his Dad there, behind him.”
      The photo had been taken from several feet away and the two men, working together on Jason’s bike, were unaware of the camera.  Jason, in a pair of dirty grey overalls, was kneeling beside the engine; his father squatting beside him.
      “It must have been taken in January or early February as he had long hair then.”
      Tom became animated by the next photograph, at the sight of so much defined skin.  It was another summer photograph, taken, I think, within his garden.  It was a frugal body in that there was nothing superfluous to it; there was no fat and his skin, like that orange shirt, just sufficient for purpose.  It was a body fashioned for action, for speed, and like a well fashioned machine it possessed an austere, utilitarian beauty.
      “Hey, that’s some fine looking bod.”  And I caught a faint wistfulness in his voice.  He said more but by then I wasn’t listening.  I reckoned I knew every inch of that hard body, each hollow and crease.  It was my territory.  I had followed each vein standing out on his strong arms.  I knew where the scant hairs on his legs finally petered out at the top of his thighs and I knew the scars and blemishes that gave character to the anonymous smoothness of his skin – the scar on his right calf where he broke his leg, the pock mark on his stomach from chickenpox; his life documented on the soft, pliant parchment of his skin.  He was seldom without some scratch or bruise, some nick or scab.
      “About earlier.  I know it was short notice, but I’d really like it if you came over to Zurich for the weekend with me.  There’s this reception, (or is it a dance? – I don’t know), on Friday night.  For the wives - ‘partners’.  It sounds a real old time sorta thing, but I’d like you to be there with me.” 
      He had never asked to anything like that before, I mean nothing official.  His love so far had had only been declared in camera.
      And the final photograph: an evening not unlike this three years ago.  Jason stood bare chested, leaning against his bike soaking up the last rays of the dying sun.  We were in the woods above the town when I took it. It too was a Monday, but taken later on in the year, though the quality of light seemed just the same.  The sun glinted liquid on his black leather jeans.  There was that contented smile on his face; it was the end of that time when he claimed he had it all.
      Tom, though, wasn’t paying any attention, he had no interest in motorbikes or even leather at that moment; he was making plans for Zurich, for walks beside the Zurich See and dinners out together.  I turned the photograph over in my hand.
      “We can have fun….” Tom’s hand was on my thigh
      I understood it then.  What I was then experiencing was what I had felt that September evening nearly four years ago.  It was as though two maps one old, one new, had been superimposed upon each other and found to correspond.  It was that same sensation, that same sense of the past falling away from me, drifting out of range, beyond my grasp, falling away and becoming unknowable.
      “Alex….” And his hand was beneath my t-shirt, ploughing slowly through the dark hairs on my stomach.
      And it had been there too, that very same sensation, when I stood in the hall earlier in the evening waiting for the broken rhythm of Tom’s boots, waiting in the silent, abstracted flat, in the stasis of shock, waiting for the present and the future to re-commence and come back into my consciousness; knowing something….something had slipped away from me.
      “I’ve waited all fucking day for this.”  Tom’s voice was thick and heavy.  “…for you….been horny all the time thinking about you…it’s what kept me going through all that shit….”

      The first time I took Tom up to my room, seven months ago now, I was slightly ashamed.  It was a typical student room: a little scruffy and with an air of impermanence that no matter how hard I tried – filling the room with things from my bedroom at my parents – I couldn’t quite dispel.  Books bowed the shelves of the inadequate bookcase; the carpet was beginning to fray by the door and the paint peel from the metal window frames.
      “It’s cooler by the window,” he said.  Tom, stripped to his white trunks, was sitting on the wide window sill, his big, round kneecaps drawn up to his chest and gazing out over the darkened back gardens.
      I walked over, handed him a glass of iced water, and joined him, cooling my face on the plate glass.
      “I used to do this as a kid; if it was too hot, or I couldn’t sleep.  I’d sit on the window sill in my bedroom and gaze out over the Bay – at the moonlight on the water, or the lights on the opposite shore.”  He took a sip of water.  “I did a lot of thinking sitting by the window as a teenager – as you can guess.”
      I stroked his leg. Tom had never spoken like this before; that great hinterland of his life before London was, until then, Terra Incognita
      “Mom once found me asleep sitting like this.  She nearly went mad, but when she told dad the next day he laughed and told her not to fuss – ‘if the boy falls the boy falls, he won’t come to any harm.  He won’t do it again.’  There’s a porch below my window with an almost flat roof, you couldn’t fall off it if you tried.  He didn’t want any of his boys ‘growing up sissy’.”
      He shrugged and turned back to the dark void of the gardens. Below us, at the party, the last guests were leaving.
      “I guess that’s why I took more risks than either Dan or Ryan.  (His brothers.)  It wasn’t enough for me to be just another jock, I had to do more; I went out on the Bay in all weathers, went climbing and scuba diving.  I needed to prove to them - and more importantly, I guess, to myself - that I was as tough, if not tougher than them.  In any case I liked all that sort of thing; I still do though I don’t get much opportunity.  I even considered a career in the military at one stage.”
      I thought of the large photograph on Tom’s desk of him and his family together in their garden.  A recent one, apparently, so he said, it had all the unreality of an advert from ‘Ralph Lauren’.  I couldn’t believe it was spontaneous as Tom claimed.  It all seemed far too posed, too contrived for that.  His parents sat together on a white painted bench with the family dog between them on the grass; their three large, smiling sons standing behind making a protective barrier between them and the granite grey sea behind.  Tom stood on the right, above his mother.  Tom’s mother in particular had that clean, easy going assurance of both money and looks.  They possessed an oddly homogenous quality, sharing the same dark hair and eyes, as though manufactured on a production line.  I was however constantly drawn back to it; by its obvious glamour - and its subtle mutability.  I could now pick out the sources of his features in his mother and father (he tended toward the latter); but over the weeks, while his family had remained static, Tom’s smile had grown less assured and more fragile.  Beyond that awkwardness he claimed he had in front of a camera and which I couldn’t quite believe in, there was a thoughtful, introspective quality to his coarse face that he didn’t share with the others and seemed to suggest a humanity that was alien to that family; and it was there now in front of me; in a face soften by the glancing light so that it lost some of its hardness.
      “I came out to Dad when we were out on the Bay,” Tom continued.  “Ryan and I were crewing for him – it was just before the autumn storms set in.  There were just the three of us in the boat and we were struggling hard, what with the wind against us, to get back to in port before the tide turned.  I was nearly eighteen – I’d just started the final grade; Ryan was home from College for the weekend.  I had been out to Mom for about a month by then and I really needed to tell him, I needed his approval.  If I had that then everything would be OK.  Only I knew I had to choose the right moment.  Dad’s this ‘no bull shit’ kinda guy.  He tells it as he sees it, only he doesn’t always think first.  I didn’t want him to say something stupid we’d both have regretted.  And that was the moment.  I knew he’d be too busy to say anything immediately – anything ‘stupid’ that is, so I told him.  He said nothing.  When we got into the marina at and were moored up he told me I had done a ‘fine job out there’.  And that was it.  That was his acceptance.”
      The conversation had reached a natural pause.  I stretched, stood up and began to undress, tossing my clothes wearily on to the chair with his.  He watched me – a vague benign sort of smile on his face – until I too was stripped to my underwear and he dropped to his feet and drew the curtain behind him.
      His hand reached out to me; there was none of the usual hesitation in him tonight – that baffling, sometimes frustrating hiatus as the nature of our intimacy changed between the emotional and the sexual.  He gripped my fingers as he pulled me close.  I slipped an arm about his soft, warm waist; I wasn’t looking for sex, only a deepening of intimacy - I wanted to bury myself in the nooks and crevices of that body and, like a hibernating animal find safety and rest, but if that was what he wanted….
      His skin was smooth, quiet flawless, there were no distinguishing marks except a small scar above his right knee; the tan applied quite evenly.  Unlike Jason’s body it communicated little of its past.  Beneath the skin the flesh was generous.  No fat - he was getting back into shape.  There was no six-pack, no sharply defined muscles, though there had been – I’d seen the photographs.  It was a body that had once been hard, like his face, and had now been softened by metropolitan affluence.  He now had a tendency to run to fat, he confessed, but there was a sturdy pioneer quality to him - a heavy, low centre of gravity body - selected over the centuries to withstand extremes of hard physical work and the North American climate.  Ideal, no doubt, for contact sports.
      I heard the last guests leaving and the faint clink of used plates and cutlery as they were tidied away.
      “He used to tell us that the three of us were different,” Tom said, in the mood to talk again.  “That we were something special, because we were his sons.  Of course we believed him, you do at that age.  I don’t s’pose when he told us we were different he had it in mind about one of us being a ‘goddam faggot’.”
      “You know Alex, I look back at my life then - hell, it’s only seven years ago – but I look back at those three or four years when I played for the school and sometimes….sometimes, you know, it’s as though that life belongs to another guy all together.  I was a pretty straight up and down sorta teenager from the provinces back then, I guess.  A jock.”  (It didn’t surprise me.)  “A real jock; I lived sport in those days - with a tight arse and a tighter stomach, and this fucking arrogant streak a mile wide I’d picked up from my father.  Ironic, I s’pose.  There were four or five of us from the ice hockey team who hung out together.  We were this little clique of guys and, God! did we fancy ourselves. You know, it was one of those moments in life when everything appears to be handed to you on a plate, and I took it.  We all did.  And yes there were times, when I found it expedient I guess, that I was as loud and as drunk as the next guy.”
      Unexpectedly he gave a snort of laughter and shook his head: “Sorry….just remembering some of the things we used to get up to, the guys and I.  There was this one guy at Prep School - shit! - did we take the piss out of him rotten, he was so fucking camp - a real queen.  Some of the guys really had it in for him.”
      I said nothing.  Down in the garden, one by one, somebody was extinguishing the garden flares.
      “When’s the funeral?” he asked.
      “Monday, I think,” I replied catching his eye.  “I’m going home Friday, though.”
      His hot, dry hands began to stroke my shoulders.
      “Do you want me to go with you?” he asked, his hot breath pouring out over my face, suffocating.  “To keep you company.  I can get Monday off.  It’s no problem; the fuckers owe me.  If you want.”  And then after a pause:  “Please.”  He sounded oddly childlike.
      I pulled my head back: “I’m sorry, but, well, I’d sooner go on my own, if that’s OK?”
      His fingers loosened their grip. 
      “It’s my parents,” I said hastily.  “They don’t want anyone to know I’m gay.  I’ve never taken any one home: it’s easier that way.  I can’t stand lying.  In any case Jason wasn’t out, unless something’s changed.  But I doubt it.  You see nobody knew about us,” I continued, tightening my hands about his.  “Not even our parents.  They never did.  How many months was it?”  I tried to work it out, but failed.  “Well, they never found out.  God knows how we managed, we were always at it,” I joked.  “We were lucky, I suppose.  I couldn’t go to the funeral with a stranger like that.  It wouldn’t be fair on Jason, or his parents, if people started gossiping about him now.”
      I could offer no further explanation beyond the cliché of: “It’s something I feel compelled to do on my own.”
      He was silent for a moment: “It’s OK,” he said finally.  “I understand.”  But he couldn’t disguise his disappointment.   It was minute or so before he resumed, and finished, undressing me, brushing his soft, plump hands against me.  My body was pumped and cut again after my finals – prepared for the summer, for lazing in Regent’s Park or Soho Square, or displaying on Compton St., or in a club.  Jason had even reformed my body in his own image.
      “So you like the idea of me being a jock?”  His voice was playful now, drawling, slowly caressing the words as they floated from his mouth on the thick air.  Already his hand was pushing deep into my pants.
      Suddenly his advances stopped.  There must have been something, a flinch or a shudder in my body; something reflexive, so slight I didn’t even notice.
      “I’m sorry,” I said.  “I can’t ….”
      We lay in the darkness under a single sheet, his hot body curled possessively about mine; his hands held at my chest.  I don’t how long we lay like that – ten minutes, maybe more, it was hard to tell.  Images of Jason replayed continuously in my mind, blending, merging, distorting, mutating….Jason in his orange shirt….Jason in his leathers….
      I shifted to ease the ache in my arm.  I felt his lips on my shoulder, and his hands began to trawl my body, looking for sex; his husky voice cajoling me.  I turned over and my hand sought his sagging cock, thick and yielding – the skin silky – like a half-inflated balloon, and in the blind dark he kissed my mouth. 


Saturday 3 January 2015

Kate Bush: The Ninth Wave

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep,
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged,
Roaring, and all the wave was aflame:
The Coming of Arthur, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed.  Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.  Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep.
Gerard Manley Hopkins


   As regular readers of this blog will know I am suffering from depression. I realize now that this slide into 'not a good place' has taken a year.  I am on the whole feeling better, though I am not out of the woods yet.  One of the consequences of my illness is that way back in the spring when I had a chance to go 'Before the Dawn' - Kate Bush's first concert in decades - I refused.  The bf had to go alone.  And although I understand now why I acted as I did I cannot but regret it.  I am hoping that, due to the success of 'Before the Dawn', Kate Bush will stage another concert series; it would certainly go a long way to ease those regrets.  However, and I hope I am wrong, but what, after concluding every concert with an apotheosis upon the wing of a blackbird, is there left for Kate Bush to do?
   Paradoxically there have however positives for me, as I think I have posted before: the limitless kindness of both the bf and my friends.  Musically it has caused have re-engaged with all of Kate Bush's work, and I have realized that I am still a massive fan after years when one reason or another I had forgotten about her. Would though that it had been the other way around with the concert concluding my re-discovery, and not kick starting it.  It certainly would have been less painful.  My album buying stopped with the extraordinary 'The Dreaming', her fourth album; perhaps her most experimental.  I've now kinda caught up, and of all the music I've listened too the most evocative and powerful is 'The Ninth Wave', the second side of her fifth album 'The Hounds of Love'.  I've returned to it again and again; I'm listening to it now as I type these words, and at times I am moved to tears by the sheer intensity of it. It's odd perhaps for a middle aged man, although a gay one, to say that he has come to identify so deeply with these seven tracks that make up 'The Ninth Wave'.  The reason for this, however, is simple: I've come to see it as an extended metaphor for depression, if not mental illness.  A very cursory trawl through the internet has lead me to believe I am not the only one to see it this way.
   Released in 1985, the seven tracks of 'The Ninth Wave' are: 'And dream of Sheep', 'Under Ice', 'Waking the Witch', 'Watching you without me', 'Jig of Life', 'Hello Earth' and 'The Morning Fog'.  The stylistic differences between the two sides of the album make it feel more like a double album, something that the CD format unfortunately blurs.  This compelling sequence of songs tells of the drowning, or perhaps near drowning of a woman adrift at sea, after, presumably, her ship went down.  The circumstances leading up to this are never explained (something in itself that admits a variant reading).  An attempt to do so was made at 'Before the Dawn' where 'The Ninth Wave' formed part of the first half of the concert - though the attempt was not to everybody's satisfaction.  (I was surprised that no use was made of  Powell and Pressburger's 1945 film 'I know where I'm Going', knowing how much an influence the two film makers have been on Kate Bush. But that's just me.)  I think it would make a very long post if I listed all the ways in which I believe 'The Ninth Wave' makes reference to depression, or at least admits to that reading, but I would point firstly to look at the lyrics of the second track 'Under Ice', which are really about surfaces of things, appearances and what lies beneath, and (obviously) about being trapped.  Drowning, too, is often used a metaphor for mental illness; 'not waving but drowning' wrote Stevie Smith.
   In some ways 'The Ninth Wave' reminds me of two of my favourite pieces of music - the two song cycles by Benjamin Britten: the 'Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings', op 31, and the later 'Nocturne for tenor, 7 obligato instruments and strings' op 60.  All three share common themes of night, dreams and terror; and all are resolved with coming of the dawn.  And although 'Before the Dawn' presented them as 'real' I am tempted to pose the question: are all the tracks merely dreams, some more terrible than others, and not the hallucinations of the dying?  Indeed, 'The Ninth wave' is in some ways a 'Dark night of the Soul', a spiritual or mental crisis, (presuming that is that the event takes place over one night) that is resolved with the dawn and  the return - the rescue - to 'the sweet morning fog' - the fog that is of everyday life, not a triumph, but how sweet everyday life must seem at that point.  On the album 'The Morning Fog' is a short, almost perfunctory track, but at the concert it was more joyful in character, says the bf, with a real folk feel to it. 
   Either way it fits quite neatly into one of Kate Bush's recurrent themes: the Pastoral.  Just think of 'Oh England my Lionheart', 'Delius', 'Bertie' and 'An Endless Sky of Honey', (both from 'Aerial').
I do not want to push the analogy too far, but there is a sense in which, for me, 'The Ninth Wave' is Baptismal: more specifically it reflects the Paschal Baptism which occurs during the night of East Saturday and Easter Day, when the candidates of Baptism undergo a mimetic death in water, and paradoxically new life comes through that water - 'The Morning Fog' is a promise of loving better after all.  None of this should surprise us; after all Kate Bush was, I believe, educated at a convent school.
   Dreams and madness seem to be recurrent themes in Kate Bush's music, perhaps most strikingly in 'Get out of My House, the final track of 'The Dreaming'; but it is also found to some extent in 'Fullhouse' on the 'Lionheart' album.  Interesting that both those tracks use the metaphor of the house in connection with the self.  On 'Never for Ever' we can presume that the singer of 'Wedding List' has been driven mad by grief.  Dreams and madness are also themes in the English Romantic tradition, (a tradition I would see Kate Bush a descendant of), just as in that tradition there is a very strong connection between those themes and the supernatural.  In many examples of, say, the English Romantic novel, or ghost story, we are never certain whether a supernatural event was real or imagined. One only has to think of 'The Turn of the Screw', or 'Wuthering Heights'.


What hours, O what black hours have we spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
Gerard Manley Hopkins