Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  The hounds of spring were on winter’s traces and Katy had arranged to visit me. I tidied assiduously, washed linen, and bought flowers, which I put in a vase. This was nothing new. I often had flowers on the table and had always been fastidious. In this I was unlike many fellow students, the worst of whom posted his dirty laundry home to his mother, who returned it washed and ironed.

  When Katy arrived something was wrong: she was distant. We went through the motions, but she seemed elsewhere. Afterwards I took her to the station. She said goodbye politely. Within a day or two I had a letter finally dismissing me.

  Autistic people have great trouble accommodating change, and sudden romantic loss is withering change of the most permanent and painful kind, second only to bereavement by death. I struggled with the double-barrelled dispossession: taken away once, given back, taken away again. The course of true love never did run smooth, but what good had all this done?

  It was my great fortune that there was a pressing distraction. The art department had organised a three-week trip to Paris, where we were to stay, all of us, in a rickety hotel near the Gare du Nord. I kept a callow diary of this expedition, the only one I have ever kept, and digging it out recently I was surprised to see how crammed and organised I had made my days. It is plain that I would allow no time to ruminate. I must be occupied.

  I sent an account of my experiences to Jon back home. This is an edited extract, leaving out most of the art galleries and focusing on other things:

  Paris lived up to my expectations and to the clichés. The city is a huge village across which you can stroll in an hour. The hotel staff seemed unfazed by the arrival of an entire department of bohemian English students bent on getting as quickly as possible to the nearest bar. Anthony and I were put into a small room with two skinny beds, foot-to-foot, and no toilet. There were no baths in the hotel either and the showers were often locked. Unpleasantly close to my pillow was a bidet. It was all very French.

  In contrast to England the weather was hot and the skies cloudless. We were sleeping with the windows open and from the back of the building came the sound of scolding mothers, wailing children, and the endless moaning of beaten-up police vans clattering around the streets.

  We studied a Paris map over a bowl of breakfast coffee with croissants, highlighting in pen the various places of artistic and historic interest that we wanted to visit. I stuck to my plan to do something in the morning, afternoon, and evening and therefore saw a good deal of the town and its museums and open spaces. We walked almost everywhere and quite quickly I found myself getting my bearings. The street name-signs are all in blue-green-and-white — house numbers in blue-and-white. They are very beautiful, and quite different from those anywhere in England. ‘Do not be deceived by the “zebra crossings”,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘Cars do not stop.’

  Like every city, Paris has its own perfumes. Everywhere there was the smell of Gauloises Turkish cigarettes, the vanilla of the two-foot-wide crêpes sold by endless pavement vendors, and a peculiar French scent seemingly worn by everybody, which clung even to the money in my pocket. It is a fragrant aroma but when I tried to point it out to people they denied being able to detect anything.

  Anthony’s French is limited to the basic, ‘Un paquet de Rothmans s’il vous plait.’ Mine is better, but not much. Nonetheless I did all the talking and all the translating, and it was exhausting. After a time he was able to manage ‘Merci’, as well as the cigarette request, but he had no interest in learning more. I like French: the rules of the language seem easier to grasp than the irregularities of English. I bought Le Monde, which was too difficult for me, so to start a bit of French conversation I asked a shop assistant for some cheese. ‘C’est un boulanger, Monsieur,’ she said in astonishment.

  Saturday is market day and lying about in baskets or on slabs were mountains of fish, vegetables of all sorts, and every kind of meat and sausage. Skinned rabbits with crimson eye sockets hung from hooks, twisting in the breeze. We walked down some small streets crammed with Greek restaurants and stumbled on a fairground roundabout. Looking for the Panthéon we went to the Sorbonne by mistake. We had a cold beer in a café and then walked into the gardens and watched the men playing boules while we drank a bottle of wine. A plastic bottle of quite drinkable red can be had from the supermarket for the equivalent of about a pound. For some reason Anthony missed his footing at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and fell down the steps. I didn’t see the spectacle because I was trying to buy some postcards in the shop.

  We visited the wonderful Musée Rodin, an eighteenth-century mansion in a very salubrious part of town — lots of architects and doctors round that area I should think. We helped a man push his car down a hill. ‘’Aving a ’ard time wiz ze goddam’ weather,’ he observed in good idiomatic American. We went up the only hill in Paris to the Sacré-Coeur and I had a look over the city through a telescope. There was a fuss in the road, where a large piece of masonry had fallen off a building — firemen and everything.

  We climbed a steep slope to a park. The sun bearing down on us made us thirsty so we ‘uncorked’ a bottle of wine. To soak up the wine we ate a phenomenal amount of bread and cheese. Still thirsty we opened another and became terribly inebriated. We managed to get back to the hotel, where I fell down the stairs into the lobby. These French stairs are very dangerous.

  In the evening we found ourselves in the Rue St-Denis, where we had to hack our way through a jungle of prostitutes. They look very like their King’s Cross equivalents, though somewhat older and with a sleeker sense of dress. The favoured outfit seems to be shiny boots, very short fur coat, and plenty of make-up. We made our way back to the hotel in good time as we had a train to catch in the morning: a group trip to Chartres.

  I watched dawn gather over the lift shaft across the alleyway at the back of the hotel. There was trouble at breakfast: no crockery, or food, or indeed anything. Irritated and in a hurry, I asked for the necessities using any vocabulary that came to mind. The waitress complimented me on my French, but I didn’t understand her.

  We sprinted to the Métro, where we spent ten minutes hunting for Montparnasse on the map. Unlike London’s superb Tube diagram, I found the Métro map a complete shambles, a snarled ball of knitting. Finally we found the stop and got to the Gare Montparnasse with just minutes to spare. We ran like the wind and leapt aboard the train. This was all very bad for my nerves.

  In a stiff breeze outside Chartres Cathedral we all had to listen to a long talk by Cliff from the art history department. He has a habit of turning his head away during the last few words of a sentence, so that half the party caught things like ‘… ain façade of the cathedral or not’, while others heard ‘You simply must see the very moving — whooooo’, as his words were blown away on the breeze. I knew that mathematics, especially geometry, had played a central role in the design of the church, and that with little more than a pair of compasses and a straight edge an entire cathedral had been conjured from the simplest elements: the square, circle, and triangle, resulting in the unified proportions that echo around the structure. From the positioning of the altar to the patterns in the magnificent rose windows, number holds sway above the flux. It reminded me of the work I did as a boy, dividing and subdividing circles.

  Cliff didn’t mention the beauty of the geometry. He was more concerned with what the bishop was thinking when Charles the Bald gave him an old shirt. That man could make any subject boring.

  Back in Paris for dinner Diana recommended a restaurant she knew and, rounding up half a dozen of us including strawberry blonde Alice and boozy Charley Lindsay, she took us off to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, a baguette’s throw from the Folies Bergère.

  We had to wait in a queue outside but before long a suave maître d’hôtel showed us through the revolving door and up a spiral staircase to a discreet little balcony with a couple of tables. We could look down from the gallery into the well
of the restaurant proper. ‘Belle époque’ does not begin to describe the romance of this place. High ceilings, polished wood, huge built-in mirrors, veined marble dados, linen napkins, and a clientele of Parisians including professional men seated opposite younger women, who may be their wives.

  This is good traditional food at a truly marvellous price. No cut glass: plain French tumblers. You decide what you want and a grumpy waiter dressed in black bow tie, waistcoat, and long white apron scribbles your order on a huge sheet of newsprint that lies on top of the red-and-white tablecloths.

  Charley speaks not a word of French but within a minute he had the swarthy waiter laughing and smiling, talking in sign language about the bet he had on for some horse race. I wish I had this social knack but I don’t.

  After coffee I needed to water my horse. I found that the gents had those curious holes over which one is, presumably, meant to squat.

  ‘How come those two footprints?’ asked Rick.

  ‘One for each foot,’ said Charlie.

  On the evening of the last day there was a knock on the door. To my immense surprise it was Alice, and Janice too, each holding a bottle of rosé. We invited them in and everyone got as comfortable as they could on the floor, on a bed, or on the edge of the bidet. We polished off the two bottles and finished the remaining beer and wine from our wardrobe ‘cellar’. From time to time I caught Alice looking at me from the corner of her eye. I must have nodded off. When I awoke the room was dark so I crawled between the sheets and was gone to the world.

  It was a terrible night. I woke repeatedly, tied up in the sheets and sweating like a horse. At about two o’clock I heard the sound of a person urinating in the washbasin.

  Morning broke heavily. It looked as though someone had come in during the night and stirred the contents of the room with a giant spoon. The sheets were wine stained and there was a cigarette burn on the wall. My pillow was nowhere to be seen, my head was thumping, and I was gasping for a drink of water. As I got out of bed I trod on an empty tin of snails in garlic butter.

  I threw on some clothes and padded off to the shared lavatory along the corridor. This toilet never flushed effectively. When you pressed the strange foreign mechanism it just boiled the contents into an unsavoury cassoulet.

  When I got back to the room I discovered Janice clambering unsteadily out of Anthony’s bed, sheepishly pulling on her bra. I wished her a dry-mouthed good morning and got a grimace in return. She pushed off back to her room.

  Anthony emerged from the sheets looking damaged.

  ‘Sleepless night?’ I asked him. He said he felt as if his head was bigger than normal and that people were playing drums somewhere. I packed slowly, feeling wobbly.

  My final diary entry read, ‘Should be okay on the boat with enough fresh air and not too many head movements.’

  Back home the crying man who wore kilts had moved out of the house, Tim Scattergood was still notching up women on his bedpost, and Reggae Man continued to play his deafening music. The antidote was my own handful of LPs. I particularly enjoyed the music of J. S. Bach, especially when played by a strange and brilliant pianist called Glenn Gould, who insisted on always performing on the same chair even after the seat fell out. I didn’t know then that Gould’s hatred of handshakes, his wearing heavy overcoats indoors, his health anxieties, his repeated nighttime egg meals, and his many other eccentricities were autistic signs, I just loved his idiosyncratic playing. Among other LPs in my collection were recordings of Gregorian chant, Spanish guitar music, and the lute works of John Dowland. But, as Sherlock Holmes says, ‘To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.’ Thus I enjoyed military bands and sea shanties, and often played records of fairground organs, tin-whistles, and bagpipes. I sought out recordings of other unusual instruments, from the glass harmonica to the serpent, zither, and autoharp and would sit and listen to sound effects LPs as though they were music. I liked music hall songs, and had a collection of the signature tunes of radio and television programmes, going back decades, many of which I can still hum.

  I liked character comedy and listened to Gerard Hoffnung reading out letters written in hilariously mangled English, which he claimed to have received from the proprietors of Tyrolean hotels: ‘There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects …’ I listened to Joyce Grenfell as ‘Shirley’s girlfriend’ discussing her boyfriend Norm, ‘the one that drives the lorry with the big ears’. On television I saw Kevin Turvey, a character played by a young actor named Rik Mayall. He sat in a swivel chair and spoke in urgent non-sequiturs about cornflakes and the meaning of life. He had a Birmingham accent and mad staring eyes. Always it was silliness and the playful use of language that made me laugh.

  Whenever I could, I liked to visit the typography department up at the main campus, where they sometimes held exhibitions of students’ work: everything from book jackets to the design of individual letterforms and punctuation marks. The full stop at the end of this sentence is not just a dot; it was drawn by someone. I was particularly taken by what they were doing to improve the look and legibility of official forms. The proper design of forms demanded, like the cathedral at Chartres, a system of mathematical rules governing proportion: a set of cardinal precepts that insisted on nothing less than the pinnacle of clarity. Many people found these forms tedious, but I saw in their hidden design a deep abstract beauty. After a look round on my own I would return to the art department, my anxiety greatly reduced and my admiration for the skill and artistry of the typographers increased.

  But still in my soul it was drizzly November and I traipsed around town trying to understand. I went on my own to hear Segovia playing at the venue where I had interviewed Barney Kessel. I wandered down Canal Passage, the road sign of which was frequently vandalised by the deletion of the letter C. Walking through the abbey ruins one night I heard a noise. In the gloom I could just make out the vague shape of a couple leaning against the remains of a flint wall, doing what people have always done in such places. I went into a pet shop, where I bought two zebra finches in a large cage: large for my room but too small for them to do more than flutter from one perch to the other. A cruel cage I now think. For quite some time they were to be my company, my friends.

  One morning in the studio Big Lil poked her huge face round my partition.

  ‘Tom,’ she asked, ‘how do you make brown?’

  Was she serious?

  ‘What sort of brown?’ I asked, ‘Raw sienna …? Burnt umber …? Cadbury’s Flake?’

  ‘You know … brown.’

  Having clear in my mind the memory of the typographers’ deep understanding of their subject I was staggered that a painter at the end of the third year of a four-year fine-art degree course did not know how to mix a basic brown, the recipe for which infants stumble upon at school.

  ‘Red, yellow, blue,’ I said, giving her my best Pan Am smile.

  I asked Tony the technician to erect partitions all the way round my area. I was now almost completely boxed in. Here I beavered away, producing the work for my degree exhibition, undisturbed and undistracted.

  One day I found that someone had pinned an anonymous note beside my small painting, Portrait of a Gibbon, praising it extravagantly and offering to buy it. Was this intended to be amusing or nasty? ‘That’s Alice’s handwriting,’ said Anthony. But why would Alice, who seemed entirely indifferent to me, bother? There was nothing to lose so I responded with my own note, writing that as a member of the Expensivist school I doubted whether the picture was within the range of the prospective buyer. It was my first spoof letter. In the years to come there would be more, and better. I waited till the studio was clear and pinned the paper in Alice’s space.

  Later in the day there was a tap on my partition. It was Alice, wearing a clingy woolen jumper. ‘Thank you for
your reply,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in buying your picture any more.’ She burst into laughter. Her teeth, I noticed, were very neat. ‘I hear there’s a spare room in your house,’ she said. Within two days she had moved in.

  Alice would borrow teabags and she started to chat to me about painting and life. She laughed at my funny remarks without taking offence, or saying that I had a strange sense of humour, or was the rudest man she had ever met. One evening after a day in the studio she walked home with me. She spoke about her family and then, idly, about her boyfriend, who was, she mentioned quite casually, no longer on the scene.

  Aha!

  She came in for a chat. She was wearing a pair of tight trousers with vertical yellow and green stripes. Her strawberry blonde hair touched her shoulders. Instead of sitting in a chair she sat on the bed. I sat beside her, at a discreet distance.

  I made some tea and we shared a couple of crumpets, then I showed her a magic trick. She wanted to see more so I did another and sat down beside her again. She took off her socks and wiggled her toes. I was very aware of her succulent perfume, which filled the crackling air. Neither of us spoke. Misjudging things badly, I lunged, smothering her and knocking over the bedside lamp. She became silent and still. I backed off.

  ‘You can’t just do this, you know,’ she said sternly.

  I subsided onto the floor, leaning deflated against the bed. Once again I had got the codes mixed up and put my foot in it. I was no good at seduction, no good at flirting and games. The business flummoxed me. Instead of logarithms at school how much more useful it would have been had we studied the rules of courtship. Alice got up and left, closing the door with a click.

  I poured the tea dregs down the sink. Why was Tim Scattergood never flattened like this? I opened some sardines and ate them standing up, as I often did, straight out of the tin. Decades later I would read that the neurologist and ‘honorary Asperger’ Oliver Sacks used to eat sardine meals in the same way. I thoroughly washed the crumpet plates and threw the tin into the rubbish outside. Then I heated some lemongrass oil to perfume the atmosphere.