Autumn

by Ali Smith

  He used to set up a projector and a screen in his back garden on summer nights, her mother says, and show her old films, I’d look out the window, it’d be a starry night and they’d be sitting in a little box of light. That was back in the years when we still had summers. When we still had seasons, not just the monoseason we have now. And do you remember the time he threw his watch into the river –

  Canal, Elisabeth says.

  – and told you it was a time and motion study? her mother says.

  What a fine friendship, Zoe says. And you go and see him every week? And read to him?

  I love him, Elisabeth says.

  Zoe nods.

  Her mother rolls her eyes.

  He’s pretty much comatose, she says in a more hushed voice. I’m afraid. He won’t.

  He isn’t comatose, Elisabeth says.

  When she says it she feels the edge of anger on her own voice. She calms her voice down and speaks again.

  He’s just sleeping, she says, but for very long times. He’s not comatose. He’s resting. It’ll have tired him out, packing up his house, all his things.

  She sees her mother shake her head at her new friend.

  Me, I’ll be throwing it all away, Zoe says. Canal, river, wherever’s nearest. Or giving it away. No point keeping any of it.

  Elisabeth goes through to the sunroom and lies flat out on the sofa. She’d forgotten the film nights, Chaplin getting a job at the circus as an assistant then pressing by mistake the button he’s been told not to press on the magician’s table and the ducks and the doves and the piglets coming flying out of all the hidden compartments.

  So I stood in the hall and phoned the number every week, I was desperate, her mother is saying through in the kitchen, 01 811 8055, I still remember it off by heart, it meant I hardly ever saw the programme, I was always in the hall. But once I’d had the idea, I thought it was so funny, I thought I was the height of wit. So, every week. Then one week I actually got through. And the switchboard girl, they used to sit at the back of the studio and take the calls and write the swaps down, she came on the phone and she said the magic words Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, and I said it, I’m Wendy Parfitt and I’d like to swap my kingdom for a horse, and they put it up on the screen and showed it as one of their top ten swaps, Wendy Parfitt, OFFERS kingdom, WANTS horse.

  I once met him, Noel, her friend says. Well, thirty seconds. Very exciting. In the staff canteen.

  Our whole life, her mother is saying. My whole life, as a child. The night after our father’s funeral, our mother – I suppose she didn’t know what else to do – switching on the TV, and we all sat there, her too, watching The Waltons, as if it’d make things better, make everything be normal again.

  All as mysterious to me, all as exciting, as comforting, as it was to you, her mother’s friend is saying. Even though I was meant to be being such a part of it. And now all anyone wants to know is whether there was any abuse. Did anyone ever do anything they shouldn’t have to us. The people who ask, they’re longing to ask, not just that, they’re longing to hear something bad, they want it to have gone wrong, they always seem disappointed when I say no, when I say that it was a great time, that I loved working, I loved above all being a working actress, I loved it too that I got given the most fantastic clothes, that I taught myself to smoke in the back of the car that picked me up for work and took me home from work – and if I say that, the thing about cigarettes, the eyebrows go up and it’s like that’s an abuse of innocence, the urge I had to be my older self. The urge we all have to be older, to not be the child any more.

  Elisabeth wakes up. She sits up.

  It’s getting dark outside.

  She looks at her phone. It’s near nine.

  She can hear the low murmur of conversation across the hall. They’ve moved to the sitting room. They must have had supper without her.

  They’re talking about a particular room they went into in one of the shops on the Golden Gavel shoot. Her mother has told her about this room. It was huge, the room, her mother told her, with nothing in it but thousands of old sherry glasses piled inside each other.

  Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility, Zoe says. One kick. Disaster. Careful where you tread. And all the old dial-phones.

  The ceramic dogs, her mother says.

  The inkwells. (Zoe.)

  The engraved silver matchboxes, Anchor and Lion hallmark, Birmingham, turn of the century. (Her mother.)

  You’re pretty good at that stuff. (Zoe.)

  I watch a lot of TV. (Her mother.)

  Got to get out more. (Zoe.)

  The butter churn. (Her mother.) The wall-mounted coffee grinder. (Zoe.) The Poole pottery. The Clarice Cliff fakes. The tinplate Japanese robots. (Elisabeth can no longer tell now whose voice is whose.) The Pelham Puppets, remember them, still in their boxes. The clocks. The war medals. The engraved crystal. The nests of tables. The tiles. The decanters. The cabinets. The apprentice pieces. The plant-stands. The old books of photographs. The sheet music. The paintings. And paintings. And paintings.

  All across the country all the things from the past stacked on the shelves in the shops and the barns and the warehouses, piled into display units and on top of display units, spilling up stairs from the cellars of the shops, down stairs from the attic rooms of the shops, like a huge national orchestra biding its time, the bows held just above the strings, all the fabrics muted, all the objects holding still and silent till the shops empty of people, till the alarms play their electronic beeps at the doors, till the keys turn in the locks in the thousands of shops and barns and warehouses all across the country.

  Then, when darkness falls, the symphony. Oh. Oh, that’s a beautiful idea. The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness. The Clarice Cliff fakes would be flutey. The brown furniture would be bass, low. The photographs in the old damp-stained albums would be whispery through their tracing paper. The silver would be pure. The wickerwork would be reedy. The porcelains? They’d have voices that sound like they might break any minute. The wood things would be tenor. Yes, but would the real things sound any different from the reproduction things?

  The women start to laugh.

  Elisabeth can smell smoke.

  No. She can smell dope.

  She lies back down on the sofa and listens to them laughing about the number of times they spoiled the set-up of shots on their filming of The Golden Gavel by laughing in the wrong places or not saying the right thing. She gathers, from what they say, that there was quite a fuss caused by her mother’s stubbornness, refusing to say the hello to the person who owned the antiques shop they were filming in as if they were just meeting for the first time, when truthfully they’d met an hour beforehand and she’d done the take already five times. Hello again! she said every time. Cut! the production team yelled.

  I just couldn’t do it, her mother says. It was so stupidly false. I was hopeless.

  You were. And it gave me such hope, the new friend says.

  Elisabeth smiles. That’s nice.

  She sits up. She goes through to the kitchen. The supper things are all still out on the table waiting to be cooked.

  She goes through to the sitting room instead and the room is fuggy with dope. Her mother’s new friend Zoe is sitting on the chaise longue and her mother is sitting in her new friend’s lap. They’ve got their arms round each other like the famous Rodin statue, in the middle of the kiss.

  Ah, Elisabeth says.

  Zoe opens her eyes.

  Uh-oh. Caught, she says.

  Elisabeth watches her mother struggle to retain not just her composure but any balance at all on her new friend’s knee.

  She winks at her mother’s new friend through the dope smoke.

  She’s been waiting for you since she was ten years old, Elisabeth says. I’ll make supper, shall I?

  It was a sunny
Friday evening more than a decade ago, in the spring of 2004. Elisabeth was nearly twenty. She was staying in. She was watching Alfie, a film meant to have an appearance by Pauline Boty in it. The film starred Michael Caine as a philanderer. It had been a very groundbreaking film at the time because Caine as Alfie spoke so frankly, straight to camera, and about sexual adventuring.

  Quite early on in the film Michael Caine walks along a bright sunny 1960s London street and knocks on the glass of a window saying Prompt Service Within, to get the attention of a young woman in the window.

  It’s her.

  She turns, looks delighted and beckons him in. As he goes through the door he switches the open sign to closed and follows her to the back. Then he takes her in his arms and kisses her, and then slips behind the clothes-rack for a comedy quick one three seconds long with her.

  It was definitely Pauline Boty.

  It was filmed the year before she died.

  Her name wasn’t in the credits.

  I was having a beautiful little life, and I couldn’t see it, the Michael Caine voiceover said. There was this manageress of a dry-cleaner’s. He went into the shop, behind the clothes with the girl, then a few moments later came out the other side saying, and I was getting a suit cleaned in the bargain.

  According to what Elisabeth had read about her life, Boty was already pregnant in these shots.

  She was wearing a bright blue top. Her hair was the colour of corn.

  But you can’t write that in a dissertation. You can’t write, she made it look like a blast. You can’t write, she looked like she’d be really good fun, like she was full of energy, or energy comes off her in waves. You can’t write, even though it’s a lot more like the language expected, though she’s in that film for less than twenty seconds she adds something crucial and crucially female about pleasure to its critique of the contemporary new and liberated ethos, which was indeed what she was also doing with her aesthetic.

  Blah.

  Elisabeth opened the Boty catalogue again and flicked through it. The wild bright colours came off the pages at her as she did.

  She stopped on one of the long-lost pictures, the one of Christine Keeler on the chair. Keeler had slept with two men, one had been Secretary of State for War in the government in London, one had been a Russian diplomat, and it was about blatant lying in Parliament, then about who had most power and who owned information about nuclear weapons – except that it soon, ostensibly at least, became about something else altogether, about who owned Keeler, who farmed her out, and who did or didn’t make money out of it.

  The Boty picture, Scandal 63, had been missing since the year it was painted. There were only photographs of it. In the finished version, Boty had painted Keeler on her Danish chair surrounded by abstracts, though some of the abstracts looked more figurative: that, there on the left, arguably, was a tragedy mask; that down there was a woman having what looked like an orgasm. Above Keeler on the chair, on something resembling a dark balcony, Boty had painted, a bit like decapitated heads on a city wall, the heads and shoulders of four men, two black men and two white men. In an earlier version, which you could see half of in a picture with Boty herself in it, you got a sense of the size of the picture, big enough to come up quite far past Boty’s waist. In this earlier version Boty didn’t use the famous image of Keeler in the chair. She changed her mind for the later version, and did.

  Elisabeth wrote in pencil on a page of her foolscap pad: art like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things by transforming them into something other than themselves. An image of an image means the image can be seen with new objectivity, with liberation from the original.

  Dissertation blah.

  She looked at the photograph of Boty standing beside Scandal 63. She took the book over to the window to see the photographs in what was left of the daylight.

  No one knew who’d commissioned this painting.

  No one knew where it was now, if it was still anywhere, if it still existed.

  She looked again at how the mask, the gargoyle tragedy face, formed and unformed itself at the side of the picture.

  Elisabeth had tried to read up about the Scandal scandal so she could think about and write about this picture. She’d read everything she could find online and everything in the library: some cultural books about the 1960s, a couple of books by Keeler, a copy of the Denning Report on the Scandal scandal. She hadn’t known that proximity to lies, even just reading about them, could make you feel so ill. The whole thing was a bit like being made to watch something as innocent as Alfie through a gimp mask and a lot of painful S&M gear you’d never agreed to wear in the first place.

  In her head whenever she thought of the true-life story round the Scandal scandal, one tiny detail in the story barbed into her like a fishhook.

  An art historian called Blunt, who’d soon have his own sex/intelligence scandal to deal with, had turned up, in the middle of the Scandal trial in 1963, at an art gallery in London where there was an exhibition of portraiture. It was the work of Stephen Ward, who’d become the villain or the fall guy of the scandal at the time and who’d shortly be dead in what looked to be suicide. Ward had done portraits of rich and famous people of the time, aristocracy, royalty, political royalty, and many of them were on show here. Blunt had handed over a massive amount of cash and bought them all, everything in the gallery, outright.

  He’d apparently taken them away and, the books and articles said, had them destroyed.

  How had he destroyed them? Had he set them alight in some well-to-do hearth? Had he doused them in petrol in an isolated country house garden?

  What Elisabeth imagined was that there was a hole dug deep in a stubbly harvested cornfield somewhere in the middle of nowhere by a tractor-sized digger, properly deep, deep enough for a couple of bodies. A small team of people stood round the rim of the hole and tossed into it portrait after portrait, making a mass grave of portraits, a pile-up of VIPs.

  Then she imagined the small team of people dragging and shoving a freshly slaughtered horse or cow off the back of a lorry into the digger’s mouth. She imagined the digger mechanically positioning the horse or cow carcass above the hole with the portraits in it, then the driver pushing the lever and the carcass dropping into the hole. She imagined the digger shunting the field’s earth over the art and the carcass and filling the hole. She imagined the treads of the digger flattening the mound, and the people dusting their clothes down, washing the earth off their hands and cleaning it out of their nails when they got back to somewhere with water.

  The horse or the cow was an extra flourish. If Elisabeth were a painter it’d be how she’d have signified the rot.

  Sometimes she imagined the Boty Scandal 63 painting in there too, the carcass falling on to it, the weight of it splitting the picture’s wooden stretcher. She imagined Blunt coming up the stairs of the house Boty’s studio was in, his pockets full of banknotes, him not deigning to touch the banister with the filth of the pre-war years, the war years and the post-war decade still deep in its wooden ridges.

  But you can’t write any of that in a dissertation.

  Look, she’d been doodling in the margin. There were swirls and waves and spirals.

  She looked back at what she’d actually written down. Art like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things.

  She laughed.

  She took her pencil, rubbed out the capital A with the rubber on its tip, made it the lower case word art, then added a completely new word right at the front of the sentence so the sentence began

  Arty art

  Portrait in words of our next door neighbour

  Our Next door neighbour to our new house we have moved to is the most elegant neighbour I have so far had. He is not old. My mother will not let me ask him the questions about being a neighbour that I am meant to be asking him for the portrait in words project we are meat to do. She says I am not allowed to bother
him. She has said that she will buy us a new video player and the Beauty and The Beast video if I make up I am asking him the questions in stead of ask them in real life. To be honest I would rather not have the video or video player I would rather ask him them, what it is like to have new neighbuors and is it the same for him. Here are the questions I would ask him 1 what is it like to have neighbours 2 what is it like to be a neighbour 3 what it is like to be meant to be old but not to be 4 why his house is full of pictures why they are not like the pictures we have in our house and lastly 5 why there is music playing when ever you walk close to the front door of our next door neighbour.

  Next morning in 2016, the little TV up on the shelf in the kitchen is on but with the sound turned down; it must have been on, lighting and darking the kitchen by itself, all night.

  Elisabeth is the only person up so far. She fills the coffeepot with water and puts it on the ring and as she turns the cooker on she sees on the screen two young twenty-somethings shopping separately in a supermarket advert suddenly simultaneously dropping the products in their hands, a loaf of bread, a couple of packets of pasta, and finding themselves in each other’s arms as if by magic, then waltzing in amazement that they know how to waltz. In the next aisle a small child catches the carton of eggs his parents have just let slip. He watches his parents as they spin round and round together by a pyramid of cheeses. Near the fish counter an old couple, the man holding a tin of something up to his glasses, the woman holding on to the trolley like a zimmer, both look upwards, like they hear something above them. They exchange a knowing look. Then the woman holding the trolley pushes it away, steps backwards unbelievably light and poised on her feet, the man lets his stick fall to the ground, bows low to her and they start waltzing with old-style grace.

  Elisabeth runs across to the shelf for the remote but she only gets the sound back on for the final seconds of the ad, where the child who caught the eggs shrugs his shoulders at the camera, the last shot is the sunlit summer supermarket from outside, people dancing in its car park, the warm middle-aged male voiceover saying: all year round making a song and a dance about you.