by Ronald Smith
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Many lunatics with their own dreams were being drawn to the Mill, hoping to earn the right to stay by helping me. I would hear people say “I’m really into it,” and I believed them. Being an enthusiast myself, I felt they shared my vision and I let them stay.
But these tranced idiots often weren’t as much help as they imagined. They wasted vast amounts of my time and hardly ever made a positive contribution. I began to grow increasingly intolerant of people who wanted to join me and have a say in how the house or the Mill should be built, yet paid no rent and could walk away whenever it suited them, leaving me to pick up the pieces.
There was Jane who sent me a pleasant letter, adorned with flowers, saying she was a member of The World Peace Organization and volunteering to help me. We allowed her to move into our blue caravan, next to the farmhouse. She didn’t believe in paying rent, she told us, but as she was on the dole she would pay as it was really the Government’s money. Her contribution would be a compost heap, she decided. Appropriating timber that cost me three pounds fifty a yard, she devoted a week to constructing a timber frame which she painted red and blue. After a few week’s use, it fell to pieces. Next, she undertook to repair her landrover which took her all summer and still it wasn’t done properly – a competent mechanic could have done the work in four hours, but she wouldn’t have that. To make suggestions or to offer criticisms of her work was to attack her personally.
Jane professed to despise possessions and people who lived in houses, and would contrive to let you know how intelligent she was, that she was a member of Mensa, for example. In order to toughen her body, she would roll naked in the snow. Her life was guided by Astrology and the Tarot deck. She refused to acknowledge British Summer Time and lived by Sidereal Time. While I liked her determination to do things her own way, getting around her ridiculous ideology was an effort.
The Convoy was a group of nomadic anarchists who travelled the road in Hell’s Angels tradition, having confrontations with the police, putting up tents and holding festivals where they had their own laws. Jane was a member of the hard core of these wolves, who lived by social security frauds and shoplifting, and I suspected she was trying to open a way for others of her clan to move in, when she mentioned that some of them might come to visit her.
“You’re not having any others staying here,” I emphasized; “You only.” There was always the danger that these armed maniacs would take over and refuse to leave, as I had heard of them doing to other unfortunates who had been foolish enough to allow them in. For a couple of years I tried to persuade her to move on, but there were always astrological or mechanical objections.
A joiner named Robin came up from Edinburgh and announced he wanted to help. He came with his wee boy whom he had to spend most of his time looking after. I had met no one so meticulously particular about keeping his tools in order as Robin, but he never actually did anything with them. He would spend half an hour lacing up his Doc Martin boots, in which he took immense pride.
I found him one day stoking up the fire with new wood I had bought. ‘For Heaven’s sake,” I told him in exasperation, “Use the scrap.” Somehow, such remarks always spiralled into existentialist conversations about the meaning of God, wasting incalculable amounts of my time.
Then his wife decided to rejoin him, with their other child. She had become a born-again Christian, so now I had two religious nuts trying to convert me. Mairi could never say no to them, always making them feel welcome, and I had to conceal my irritation for fear of arousing her disapproval.
But in the end I packed Robin off, imprisoned in the back of a van driven by his wife with their kids in front. “Goodbye Robin!” I shouted jubilantly, banging on the rear door as they trundled down the drive, to start a new life in Milton Keynes.
Jake came to visit shortly after we returned from India; he wanted to use part of the Mill as a studio to do some painting. So I installed him in the top floor with its skylight window and grand view over the Tay estuary to the Sidlaw Hills.
He would observe things very closely and see details that no one else took in. It was Spring, and the swallows had returned to nest in the Mill. He noticed that one pair had built its nest inside, on the ceiling of the ground floor workshop. The outside door cleared the floor by about four inches, and when it was closed, the parent birds would dive and skim at top speed in and out between the concrete and the door.
Soon three baby swallows appeared on one of the rafters, sitting equidistant from one another, waiting to be fed. They always sat in the same place, and every so often a tiny dropping would fall in a straight line to the floor. Each dropping would land exactly on top of its predecessors with pinpoint accuracy. Jake loved this.
There was a dog staying at the Mill, a spaniel. One day he saw the dog standing outside the closed door, watching intently. A swallow swooped from under the door – straight into the mouth of the dog, who chewed and gobbled it noisily.
Jake was horrorstruck.
I listened to his story with a chill of foreboding creeping over me. It was the Dog, its presence haunting me, returning yet again.
Jake was extraordinary. He just painted one thing, really: the sea and the sky, or the land and the sky – a horizon with maybe a rock in the middle. If you watch him painting, you realize that for him, painting is an unending process; maybe the light lightens, or a hill moves across the horizon, or the rock disappears, painted over.Every bit is hallucinogenic; examine a square inch and there are marks, almost like the pores in pigskin. There are paintings secreted all around his studio. If he gets a painting back for repair, he starts painting it again. His paintings never really end; they have to be physically taken away from him.
They’re mysterious paintings and fascinate people; but while he has had many chances to become famous, he has spurned them all. When he was twenty-four, he had his first exhibition in London booked. But when the day of the private viewing came, there were no paintings; he had sold them all, every one. With the five thousand or so that he made, he buggered off to Spain for a few years, until his money was all spent. Ever since then, he has always messed up other opportunities. Ironically, his work is as good as an old master’s; his paintings will last for centuries because they’re meticulously done, with oils and varnish. But, essentially, he is bored with painting which he thinks is just a joke. He prefers dancing.
The idea that he might be a reincarnation of Rembrant occurred to me when I visited him in Amsterdam the summer after Mairi and I went to India. I had got as far as Dover, where I met Garry; he had just lost seventy thousand pounds at a pop festival he had organized and was very depressed. He gave me a lift across the Channel and into Holland, but he was driving like a madman, so I was glad to part with him and go to visit Jake.
It was the first time I had been to Amsterdam and I really loved it. Transported by a return of my youthful enthusiasm, I put my back out of joint playing Frisbee, but even that couldn’t put me down; I went Disco Dancing and raving every night. I felt as if I had been there before, that I knew the city.
Naturally, I went to the Museum and saw Rembrant’s most famous painting, “The Night Watch’. I could see that Rembrant had really hated doing it. I knew that he had painted the picture to pay off all his creditors, and he had put them into it, dressed in sinister black. There was also a portrait he had painted of his son Titus. I thought it looked remarkably like me.
Imagining that there might conceivably be such a thing as reincarnation, I tried to envisage what Rembrant would be like if he came back. Considering all the trouble he endured, I thought he would be fed up with painting – he might paint, but would be sick of it at the same time. He would avoid every chance of publicity and never again allow himself to become famous.
Jake had been in Amsterdam for only a couple of months; he had a studio there paid for by the Arts Council. Yet he knew where every bar was, or where you could get anything you wanted. I felt he had a much more intimate knowle
dge of the city than he could have got in that short time.
We were sitting in a café one day at lunchtime and he was telling me a story about a statue in the Royal Park. It represents a guy who did not have the gift of oratory; but one day while he was asleep, a bee flew into his mouth. There is a Dutch superstition that if a bee lands in your mouth, you receive the gift, you become a great speaker.
Just at this moment, when Jake was relating the story, a telephone rang in the back of the café; I looked up, and saw on the wall a painting of two people lying in bed, a man and a woman, both sleeping. A bee had squeezed in behind the glass and died. It was right over the man’s mouth.
Just as the picture on the wall was a reflection of what Jake was saying, so the telephone’s ringing was echoed by church bells chiming somewhere in the city. It was a mythic awareness that these images symbolized something, hinted at some deeper meaning, and my mind slipped out of the present for a moment.
Jake and I had had a long association, and he had always been like a father to me, at least in terms of painting. I had first become intimate with Mairi in his house in Edinburgh. Now, when I looked at Jake, I felt that he had the same birdlike eyes as Rembrant, the same nose, the same character; that he had been Rembrant, and I had been his son.
Then the reverie dissolved. I spoke up brightly: “Jake, I think you’re a reincarnation of Rembrant. And I’m a reincarnation of Rembrant’s son.”
He looked at me blankly, uncomprehendingly.
“You’re just like he would be if he came back. Just think of it – we could write to some millionaire and say ‘You think that Rembrant is dead; well, I can tell you he is alive and living in Edinburgh…’ ”
“Don’t be so fucking stupid!”
“But look over there at that painting, there’s a bee in the guy’s mouth…”
“Look, I do NOT want to talk about it. At all.” He snapped, irascibly.
Nor was I ever permitted to bring up the subject again. Just what Rembrant would have done, I thought.
