In Milan, where I have taught for the last twenty years, one has ample opportunity to conduct research of this kind. My late wife would be constantly complaining about the swing of my head as we passed another interesting sight; a girl in some particularly striking outfit. And I would reassure her that I was only considering the nature of history.
Twenty years ago, I remember watching a girl in a striking black and white outfit, her figure as thin as a pencil. She had a long white jacket with huge black discs for buttons. It was one of the first things I saw after I arrived, harassed and sweating at the train station in my thick grey suit, and it struck me that the girl’s outfit made her look like some kind of circus clown. And I wondered if I had left one kind of circus and gone to another – though at the time, this new circus seemed far more appealing. That was twenty years ago. Ten years later, no woman would wear such an outfit as that of the pretty clown in the train station. What had happened in those intervening ten years? History had happened. Everyone had grown a little older; young girls had chosen to reject everything their mothers had told them, new styles had appeared and been preferred – why had they been preferred? Who knows; they were certainly no better than the old ones, only different. Another ten years on, and once again the clown can wear her costume with pride.
We can imagine a grand book; The History of Fashion. I’m sure such books exist already; the one that I imagine is big, heavy, glossy – the perfect ‘coffee table’ book. It shows the evolution of costume – European costume, of course, with perhaps the occasional nod to other cultures. First there are drawings of primitive looking people in animal skins; a piece of whimsy designed to give the book an appearance of comprehensiveness. As we turn the pages we see mediaeval women with fantastic pointed hats and tiny waists, and then the evolution of incredible hooped skirts. The bustle has its moment, and then is gone. Now we are in the early part of our own century, though still it is hard to imagine anyone ever wearing things such as these; it’s like trying to picture dinosaurs crashing through ancient jungles. And so it goes on, each period up to the present day illustrated by its own style. But then the last page shows a hundred models in contemporary outfits, and beneath the picture runs a solemn caption: In today’s ever changing world, we are at last free to choose, from the vast range of styles available, the one which best reflects our own personality. Of course, a hundred years from now, the successor to our book will illustrate with a single model the ‘style’ of our age. And if we could show our book to the mediaeval woman in the pointed hat, she might be perplexed at the unrepresentative choice we have made from her own rich culture.
Is the history of nations any different from the history of fashion? An ideology emerges, it sweeps across nations; it kills millions. And then its moment is over. Like the dinosaurs, it has simply gone out of fashion.
Where does it come from, this unstoppable force of change? Do the women of the world slavishly follow the whims of a handful of dress designers, or are the successful designers simply those with an eye for the ‘look’ of the age? Can an ideology be imposed on a nation of unwilling, uncooperative innocents, or must it be a reflection of something – some twisted parody of the collective spirit?
And can one call a halt to the process? For forty years a nation puts itself into the deep freeze of Communism; history is declared to have ended. There is no change; from one year to the next we drive the same car, wear the same badly made clothes, read the same books – or different versions of the same books. Even the price of a pint of beer remains for thirty years at the same fixed level. Then suddenly the freezer door is opened and burning coals are being thrown inside. And suddenly we see that everything which we thought had meaning was in fact an illusion. We see that power and fear are things which come in many varieties, and some varieties can simply go out of fashion. Was this all an act of kindness on the part of those who shovel in the coals?
I think again of F., and the details which Lowell gives us from the two lives of that unfortunate man. In reality he was, as I mentioned, an industrial worker in his thirties. A single man, rather solitary, who had few friends. In the period after his awakening from the coma, he spoke lovingly of his wife Nancy, a woman who worked part time in a grocer’s shop, and whom he had first met some fifteen years earlier at a dance – a meeting that occurred by one of those strange, happy coincidences, when he and a friend went there because the cinema was already full. After courting Nancy for several months, she agreed to marry him, and over the years they had a son and a daughter. All of this, the psychologists would have to disprove. They would have to persuade F. that there was no dance, no Nancy, no fifteen years of marriage. Which would be the greater horror; to be told that your wife and children were dead, or to be told that they had never existed?
And should we tell Duncan that his father was not, in fact, the heroic dissident whom he imagines him to be? Should we spare him the endless rewriting of that scene, in which he imagines his father to have been killed by the secret police? Should we even tell him that his father was not killed at all? But then, as Galli would have said, what profit would there be in that?
They took away the Museum of the Working People and all its exhibits. Not only the photographs of the politicians; there were all those union banners, and the uniformed mannequins in glass cases, and all those paintings of strong faced men and women meeting their production quotas, and there were all the different kinds of miners’ helmets, and the display cases full of badges. But it was all an illusion; the banners, the badges, the glass cases. It was all a mere photograph, cut out and superimposed on another mere photograph. And now there is an exhibition of Lego models.
For years, a nation lives in fear of itself, an imaginary economy is constructed in which debt and inefficiency is passed from one place to the next in an endless game – everything is decided by faceless committees in a way that is arbitrary, inexplicable, meaningless. The power, the ideology – these, it now seems, were all nothing more than illusions. Really, there was no power, no ideology; only fear. There is something of F. in us all.
But there is also a converse to F.; another case in Lowell’s book. This is R., a woman suffering from severe amnesia, brought about by brain disease, which rendered her almost totally incapable of having any short-term memory. R. was cared for in the psychiatric hospital where Lowell worked. Every day, her husband would visit, bringing her a bunch of flowers, and whenever R. saw him arrive she would hug him frantically, telling him how much she had missed him and how terrible it had been without him. She would go through this scene every single day. As soon as her husband left, she would forget seeing him; all that would remain was her long-term memory of him from years before, and she would be filled again with sadness and longing. We have all known the experience of waking up and, for a moment, not knowing where we are – that feeling of disorientation, as if we have been suddenly put into a strange world. For R., every moment was like this.
Alongside the collective memory, the collective fantasy, there is also the collective will to forget; when once more the time has come for some ‘alteration and amendment’. Not only was there no power, no ideology; not only was this all a terrible illusion, but it seems that it was the illusion of just a handful of men, somehow perpetrated on the rest of us. And now we are all filled with insatiable nostalgia for the time long ago, before their evil was allowed to pollute us. Again, there is something of R. in us all.
Why do these medical anecdotes fascinate me? For the same reason that Galli fascinates me; because I am reminded that what we regard as reality is only a point in an infinite space of possibilities. And everything we see has come about by an accumulation of accidents; the random preference for one possibility over another. Why have the banners and mannequins been replaced by Lego models? Why were the banners and mannequins there in the first place? There is no inevitability about any of it; we might as well argue about why the sun shines today when yesterday it was cloudy.
But I am digress
ing – so easy to let my mind wander, when I pause from writing and watch the landscape in its rich evening colours as it passes by the window of the train. Tomorrow I shall start again, and begin to tell the story of how it was that Robert Waters met his death.
PART TWO
5
Twenty years ago, when Charles King was still in his early thirties, he would leave his flat in Cambridge every weekend and take the train to London to be with Jenny.
They had met one afternoon while King was attending a conference at the Academy of Sciences. The lectures bored him, and so he went out onto the Mall to enjoy the sunshine. The street was quiet. On a corner, a policeman idly drummed his fingers upon his holster. It was August – the girls were in their summer clothes.
King loved women, or rather, he was fascinated by them. Watching a woman in the street, he would try to imagine how her unclothed body might look. For all his experience, this was still an unfathomable mystery for him. Although he could easily assess the volumes, the masses, the textures which ought in principle to lie beneath a cotton blouse, or a skirt; still that final act, that process of mental undressing, was a conceptual leap which forever lay beyond him. The naked image was an abstraction, a theory; a thing inferred, but not capable of being appreciated unless actually seen. This was something which intrigued him.
In the Mall, he watched the women he passed without questioning why he looked at them, or even asking what satisfaction it gave. He turned his head as a plant bends its stalk to the sun. In the case of the plant, the sunlight inhibits growth; the shaded side grows faster and the stalk bends. Perhaps there was something inhibiting too, in this preoccupation with the opposite sex; it was a thing from which he sometimes longed to be free. When he thought about it, he was aware of the irrationality, and yet also of the sober logic of his obsession. For all the metaphysical reasoning he might care to put forth, his response could be ascribed to the actions of various hormones, pheromones and other molecules. His behaviour was just as deterministic as the plant’s, and just as irrational, if one attempted to embed the closed logic of chemistry in some higher meaning.
A girl was fiddling with a bicycle which she had placed upside down on the pavement while she dealt with the faulty gears. She was wearing a thin white top, which hung low as King approached and the girl’s concentration remained fixed on the bicycle. He tried to reconstruct, from the fragment of cleavage that he could see, her breasts and the rest of her body. He stopped and asked if she needed any help with the bicycle. This was how his affair with Jenny began.
Every weekend, he would leave his flat in Cambridge and take the train to London to be with her.
Jenny was twenty-three. A few months before King stood in the Mall watching her as she mended her bicycle, and she watched the play of his eyes on her body, she had been rejected and left by the man she had been engaged to for over a year. She knew that the connection between love and happiness is a tenuous and uncertain one, and she soon knew that for King the connection between sex and love was equally arbitrary. Nevertheless, she was willing to join with him in the strange contract which he offered.
She found him good looking, though a little old (he was her senior by nearly ten years). She liked his shoulders, and his eyes. When he told her he was a physicist, she guessed he might be involved in nuclear secrets. This frightened her. But he explained that he was a theoretician; his only tools were pen and paper and his imagination, and then he seemed to her like some kind of exotic poet.
She gave him her address (there was no phone), and then she had to get back to work. Later that afternoon, he went to her flat.
When she undressed in front of him, she felt fearful and uneasy. She thought about the risk of getting pregnant. King told her to relax, and to remove her clothes slowly, as if her garments were so costly and special that she had to take the greatest care with them. While she did this, she did not watch his face. When the last piece of her underwear was removed it was, to King, like a narrow mask being drawn away so that suddenly the identity of the person beneath can be recognized. Her body, like her face, had to be seen in its entirety. When she got into bed with him, she was surprised that he did not want to have sex with her. They lay together, and then went to sleep. Afterwards, she felt she understood him less, but liked him more.
I said that King was fascinated by women. More precisely, he was intrigued by the differences between them, and the similarities. It was in the space between women that his real interest lay; this was the warm niche in which his fantasies lived. He noted the variations in temperament, character and anatomy; subtle yet so crucial, and as decisive as the difference between, say, a Gothic arch and a Baroque one.
Do I mean that he regarded women as cathedrals, of a sort? Not necessarily, but even so, women were a kind of religion for him. The act of desire was the one true act of faith which he knew.
That narrow void between the clothed and the naked, between one woman and another, between the potential and the actual; this was the world of King’s fantasy. He was thrilled more by what could be than by what was.
Jenny’s flat in Bayswater was small and claustrophobic; hardly more than a bedsit. Like everyone else, she was on the waiting list for anything better. When King first saw it, he was touched by the way she had tried to transform the place into a home in microcosm. This made him feel a sadness which took the edge from his sexual anticipation. It was like a miniature parody of domesticity, and it suddenly made him feel as if he were entering the play-house of a little schoolgirl, and then he felt terrified by the thought that he might want to use her body. It was a moment of disarousal.
The flat was really quite typical; a small sitting room with a bedroom (or rather, sleeping area) separated by a curtain. And a tiny kitchen, the sort that might have been designed for a canal barge. The bathroom was outside on the landing. Every so often, King would hear its door open and close, and he would hear the liquid drumming of a person urinating. Someone living here, he assumed, would begin not to notice these things.
Jenny went to the vestigial kitchen and lit the gas to make a pot of tea. This was the point around which they had negotiated his presence in the flat that afternoon. He told her to forget about that, to come back, and to take off her clothes. She did not know how to respond to this.
When he had first entered the flat, King noticed the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece, and the clean, patterned curtain which hid her bed. He noticed the photographs fixed on the wall, of her family and friends. And he imagined that he had entered the play-house of a little schoolgirl, and he felt horrified by this thought. He felt sordid and unaroused, and he tried to recapture the thrill of excitement he had known only a few hours before, when he had stood on the Mall and watched her breasts, and he had imagined what her naked body would look like, and how it would feel to run his tongue across the smooth flesh which he had glimpsed beneath her white top. But he could not recapture that sensation. Still he felt sordid and unaroused when she went to make a pot of tea, and he watched her body as she moved, and he tried to imagine the pleasure of her skin next to his, and still it was as if he were watching a defenceless child; a woman’s body, but the soul of a little lost child, who misses her family and keeps photographs of them on the wall. He told her to come and take off her clothes.
She did not know how to respond to this. She realized that she had not yet asked herself why, precisely, she had invited this strange man to her flat. She had of course known that it might lead to them having sex, and she had been prepared simply to see how things went. But this was too abrupt. It seemed to break the rules. She switched off the gas and turned round to look at him.
‘You,’ she said, ‘take yours off first!’
And so he undressed. And when he was finished, and stood naked before her – the first naked physicist she had ever seen (strange thought!), the first man she had met in a street and who had come into her flat and stripped for her – then she looked at his body and his shoulders, and his memb
er was like a little flaccid fruit, nestled beneath the wiry shade of his pubic hair. He pulled back the curtain and lay down on her bed, which creaked like an old pram, and then she began to undress, nervously. He told her to relax, to slow down, and to imagine that her clothes were so rich and costly that she should take the greatest care with them; which puzzled her, and reminded her of a game she used to play when she was a little girl, and she would pretend to be a princess. Then she got into bed with him, and they lay naked together in silence.
Every weekend, King would leave his flat in Cambridge and take the train to London to be with her.
From the outset, he made it plain to her that his body was the only thing he was prepared to offer her, and hers was all that he asked for. He told her that he slept with other women, and that he loved none of them. Or all of them, since love was nothing more than a process involving the transport of certain ions across certain cell membranes. And he was not interested in chemistry.
All of this troubled her. It seemed to go against all the rules she had been taught, and all the other rules she had laid down for herself. Can love be reduced to a chemical reaction? But the fact was, that there was something exciting about the idea. She had had enough of demanding men, who had pretended to love her in order to sleep with her; who had loaded all the shit in their lives onto her, and who then had told her that she was the cause of all their problems. Love was a chemical reaction, and their bodies were nothing more than molecules to be experimented with. She still did not believe this, but the outer fringes of belief seemed tempting.
Music, in a Foreign Language Page 4
