by David Plante
A short time after, it seems, Ann Stokes had her annual pottery sale – her many-coloured pots and plates, and, too, ceramic birds and toads and fish spread out on tables and bookshelves and even an ironing board – and many people there, while, upstairs, Adrian was very ill in bed. Ann had arranged to have an intercom connected throughout the rooms where the sale was taking place in case Adrian should call her. Over the voices of the guests Adrian’s breathing was heard, rather rough, and then, suddenly, very rough and rattling. A doctor was at the pottery sale, and he went up to Adrian and came down to say Adrian was dying. He asked Ann if she would want him taken to hospital, but Ann pleaded, no, he should die at home. Nikos and I were leaving with other guests, but Ann asked us to stay, a few close friends including Richard and Mary Day Wollheim, and Ann’s sister Margaret Mellis, who was herself once married to Adrian, and Margaret’s son Telfer by Adrian, and Philip, the son of Ann and Adrian, the sons both cousins and half-brothers. Ann, excited, thought we must be hungry, and over the telephone ordered tongue, and was upset that when the tongue arrived it was not salt, as she had asked for salt tongue. I felt it was very strange to be in the sitting room of the house, eating tongue and bread, while, continuing through the intercom, Adrian’s always deepening rough and rattling breathing sounded loud in our silence. After a while, Nikos said we should go, and, embracing Ann and Margaret, we did. In the morning, we rang Ann, who said that Adrian died shortly after we left, and that she and her sister had spent the night together in bed speaking about their husband.
When I expressed to Richard Wollheim wonder at why sculptures on medieval cathedrals were placed so high no one could see them, he, atheist that I know him to be, said in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘For the greater glory of God.’
Stephen says that to him to fall in love is to find himself hallucinated by another, and I understand this, if to be hallucinated by another is to be in a constant state of wonder about the other, to ask, over and over, who is this other? how is it that I am with this other? why am I with this other? These moments of heightened wonder occur when, lifting my eyes from a book I am reading, I see Nikos watering the plants in the sitting room, and I simply do not understand what it is in him and in me that makes me love him as I do. I feel the strain of that love as of my very heart straining to go out towards him, drawn by his presence at moments when he, as if so unaware of me he might be alone in the room, is concentrating on watering his plants. I put down my book and stare at him. This sense of hallucination in the wonder has, I think, nothing to do with any self-interested impulse, and not a sexual impulse, but is a more primitive impulse; and at these moments I am convinced by the love that religions, inspired by that primitive impulse, are meant to make central to their visions, but which love they so very, very rarely act on.
Through John and Hugh, who spend their winters in London as the unheated villa is too cold, we met Patrick Kinross, with whom they are guests, and he invited Nikos and me to drinks. He is known, most reputably, for his book on Atatürk, and he has also written a book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He stayed with them in their house outside Paris and told this story: the Duchess called upstairs, ‘David, luncheon is ready,’ to which the Duke responded, ‘Just a moment, darling, I have something on my mind,’ which made her shout out, ‘On your what?’
Among the other guests, all much older than Nikos and I, was Charlotte Bonham Carter, widow of Sir Edgar, who, blinking rapidly as she talked, mentioned T. E. Lawrence. I stopped her to ask, amazed at the possibility, if she had known Lawrence of Arabia. Blinking even more rapidly, she looked at me with a frown of annoyance and said, ‘He used to come, and we’d see him; he used to go, and we didn’t see him. Why do you ask?’ I said, ‘Well, can you imagine someone from far outside the world he inhabited excited to make contact with someone who was in contact with him?’ She blinked even more rapidly and said, ‘Yes, I can imagine that.’
I asked her who was the most interesting person she had met, and, blinking even more rapidly, she said, ‘My dear, I think it must have been Puccini.’
Patrick Kinross told the story of visiting, as a young man, an old aunt who had been present at the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. When he asked her, ‘What was it like?’ all she answered was, ‘It was a great fuss.’
Some time later, I drove Charlotte Bonham Carter to the wedding of Deborah Rogers, my literary agent, and Michael Berkeley, composer, in Wales. In her old age, she has curvature of the spine, so had to lift her entire body to turn and look at me, which she did, always blinking, when she inquired, ‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ I said I was. Then she asked, rolling the R, ‘Do you know the Roosevelts?’ I said I didn’t. ‘How odd,’ she said, ‘I thought all Americans knew one another.’
No, I didn’t know the Roosevelts, and, though it was part of my American history, I had never met anyone in America whose great-, or even great-great-aunt had been at President Lincoln’s assassination. I do have friends in America, though I never think of them as all together connecting up to make a world, and I certainly never think of my family in this way. In England, it seems, if you meet one person, you find that within a short time – at a gallery opening, at a publisher’s party to launch a book, at a private drinks or dinner party – you are connecting people to one another, especially in large, interconnecting families, with the deepening knowledge that they do all belong to a world that is larger than any one of them and that contains them all.
I’ve met Charlotte Bonham Carter any number of times (once at a lecture on stone anchors in the East Mediterranean where she sat next to me, she muttering from time to time, ‘Fascinating,’ and I wondering what I was doing at a lecture on stone anchors in the East Mediterranean), but she never remembers who I am, though she always treats me matter-of-factly as someone to whom she would talk intimately about someone else whom she is intimate with, expecting me to know this person as well as she does. It hasn’t taken me long to realize that the English are not reserved, but assume, even on a first meeting, the openness of telling me about a hysterectomy or about a daughter suffering from anorexia or a son who was being sent down from Cambridge for drugs. Lady Charlotte, as she is called though I learned she wasn’t the daughter of a duke, a marquis, or an earl, and was perhaps called Lady Charlotte by people who didn’t really know her but thought her too special to be anything but the daughter of a duke, a marquis, or an earl, whereas those who really did know her, such as John and Hugh, simply call her Charlotte, herself seems to imagine, with no sense at all of exclusiveness, that she and everyone else belongs to an England of country houses and a London of the Covent Garden Opera House, embassies, and the Royal Horticultural Hall.
Lady Charlotte is thought not to have known about the more intimate aspects of marriage on her wedding day, when she, arranging flowers on the altar, was asked who was to be married and responded, ‘I am,’ and when asked where she and her husband were to go on their honeymoon answered, ‘I don’t know about him, but I am going to Afghanistan.’
I asked her at one time about her travels, and she said, emphatically, ‘I draw the line at Afghanistan.’
She sometimes visits John and Hugh in their villa outside Lucca, traveling by train and with a bag of hard-boiled eggs, sleeping in the train stations if her connections leave her in the waiting room to spend the night.
John told me that he and Hugh were in a restaurant with her, where she often made gestures to communicate with four men sitting at a table near by, and when asked who the men were she responded, ‘I’m not sure, but I think the Amadeus String Quartet.’
Natasha Spender has lively stories to tell about her. Once, seeing her enter a reception and look about, Natasha, thinking she might be looking for someone she knew, went to her, and Charlotte put an index finger to her lips and said, ‘Not a word, not a word, my dear, we can talk any time,’ and passed her to meet people she hadn’t met.
She is famous for appearing at intervals at performances, but du
ring the performances themselves she is out at other events, even if this requires a change of clothing which she does in ladies’ rooms, and at the interval of a musical evening she will say, ‘Splendid, splendid, but I did think the brass was rather too loud,’ to the total bemusement of the person she addresses because the performance was of a piano and violin duet.
She could only have evolved in England.
Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to float. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!
John Russell lives with Suzi Gablik. They give drinks parties where Nikos and I have met, oh, so many. Francis almost always comes. Suzi said that expecting nothing from Francis is a condition of one’s friendship with him. At one drinks party, I found Francis standing by himself and went to speak to him. He was wearing tight gray trousers, a black turtleneck pullover, and another turtleneck pullover on top of this, but this one white. I imagined his body as having very thin legs and a bulging belly. The sleeves of both pullovers were pushed up, showing his powerful forearms and red hands.
I knew it was risky – but I liked taking such risks with Francis – but I tried to start a conversation by saying that the writer Jean Rhys had told me that she had flashes of religion. ‘Does she, now?’ Francis asked. Drunk myself, I asked him if he ever did. He laughed. ‘Never, never never never never never.’ I had heard him say this before, but, as before, I wanted to know what he was vulnerable to, and I asked him if he had any addiction. He didn’t have any, he said. I said mine is sleep. ‘Sleep?’ he asked. ‘Really?’ I asked him, ‘How much do you sleep?’ He said, ‘I get up every morning at seven o’clock.’ ‘I wish I could do that,’ I said. He asked me, ‘But don’t you like consciousness, David? I love conscious life. I love being conscious.’ He stuttered, but he didn’t laugh.
We went to the opening of the Cecil Beaton show at the National Portrait Gallery, curated by Roy Strong, the director of the museum.
At the entrance was a photograph of a totally naked young man and woman, which announced that the National Portrait Gallery had opened itself up to the times, and there was an excitement in the dense gathering of the opening – yet, as if assumed among everyone that the opening had always been there privately but never quite announced publicly, as if the openness to sexual frankness had been a given among everyone there and only required an exhibition to make the inward given an outward given. So, no sense of shock, but of: yes, of course, of course. Yet, a sense of liberation in the of course.
Sitting on the top step of the flight just outside the exhibition was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, a young man wearing a silk bomber jacket embroidered on the back with a Japanese roaring lion, and standing around him, looking down at him, was a circle of admirers. Among them I saw Peter Schlesinger. I asked him, ‘Who is that?’ Peter whispered, ‘His name is Eric Boman. He was a friend of Salvador Dalí and Marilyn Monroe.’ I stared at this Eric Boman, who kept his eyes fixed on the steps below him.
For Easter we went for the Resurrection services at the Cypriot Orthodox church with Julia Hodgkin. She was amused that while the priest was at the altar a man was leaning on it as if they were having a business talk while the priest was officiating. There I saw Öçi’s mother Mrs. Ullmann and his brother Tony, but I knew from the past that she was suspicious of me for my relationship with Öçi, so I stayed away even from asking how Öçi was in New York.
Ann Stokes, to supper, asked us what we thought of her joining a circus, as she had always longed to ride into a circus ring on the head of an elephant.
Having commissioned the historian Roy Strong to write a monograph on the paintings of Charles I on horseback by Van Dyck, Nikos went to Brighton where Roy Strong lives to talk about the book, and I went along with Nikos. We walked along the seafront. Roy was wearing knickerbockers with, I felt, the same aplomb with which, in the age of Charles I, he would have worn a wide-brimmed slouch hat, a lace collar, knee-breeches and silk stockings and shoes with pompoms. Roy appears to assume that all of British history is his, and he can, rightly, inhabit whatever period he chooses, and though I imagine him at ease in Elizabethan London, the elegance of early seventeenth-century British court life under Charles I would do, with poems, medals, eulogies, music, and such grand masques as Britannia Triumphans, all to end in the execution of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell.
Roy said he thinks of me as a Henry James character.
Nikos and I often have dinner parties in our small flat in Battersea, and often enough Francis Bacon comes. More often, Francis invites us out to restaurants, sometimes with as many as ten or twelve people around tables pushed together. At a restaurant, we met Francis’ friends Dicky Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, both artists. Francis at restaurants is always as attentive to the waiters as he is to his friends, and whenever a waiter puts a bottle of wine on the table Francis hands him a pound note. I once saw him put a pound note in a bread basket that was being passed around by the people at the table. After, Nikos and I would drive Francis home to his studio flat in Reece Mews, in South Kensington, and wait for him to open his narrow door among the wide doors of the mews garages and climb his steep flight of stairs, sometimes stumbling and falling to his knees as he went up.
And we see him at drinks parties. At one party, he was introduced to Lee Miller, then Francis came to where Nikos and I were standing with Stephen and Natasha and said to us, laughing dryly, ‘You mean, that’s the Lee Miller whose photograph was taken by Man Ray? I would have thought her beauty would have remained, but nothing of it has, has it?’ We also laughed, too intimidated by Francis to stand up to him.
He had arrived drunk, and he was almost incomprehensible when he spoke. After Nikos had left our group because he wanted to but wouldn’t stand up to Francis, Francis said to Stephen and Natasha and me – in reference to what, I didn’t know, but I wondered if he was thinking of George – ‘In every relationship there’s always a cherished and a cherisher, always a cherished and a cherisher.’ I said, ‘I wonder if that’s true. In my case – or, rather, in Nikos’ and my case – I don’t know who is the cherisher and who is the cherished.’ ‘Oh yes, you know,’ Francis said, ‘oh yes, and don’t deny it. Don’t deny being cherished. Don’t deny it. Take it. Let yourself be cherished. You’re the cherished one. And don’t deny yourself being cherished.’ Natasha said, ‘But you don’t understand, Francis. David is the cherisher.’ Stephen said nothing. Francis lurched away with a jerk of his whole body, as if someone had suddenly called him away, and staggered from person to person.
Natasha left Stephen and me to talk with others, and Francis staggered back to us. Stephen asked him if he was working on something new, and Francis, loosely nodding his head, said, ‘Yes. I’m doing paintings of two bodies locked together. Locked. Locked together.’ He lost his balance whenever he paused to talk, but each time he regained his balance he repeated, ‘Locked together, two bodies.’ I said, ‘Then they’ll be love paintings.’ He leaned towards me and almost fell onto me, his wine splashing from his glass. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ Then he stumbled backwards, his head up, and there suddenly came to his face a look of such terror that I laughed. I then realized that he was about to fall backwards, but before I could reach out to grab him he regained his balance and turned towards the wall and went to stand with his back against it. He mistook a door for the wall, however, and when he leaned against the door ajar it gave way, but, again, he righted himself just as I rushed to him to stop him from falling. Leaning now against the solid wall, he said, ‘I want real tragedy.’
I am always aware of, even always in a daze of wonder about, the world I’m in. When Nikos and I were at the house of Patrick Kinross, I wondered why he, showing us into h
is sitting room – what I guess he calls his drawing room – stopped to stand still to admire, as he finally said, the proportions of the room, as if he had suddenly become aware of the proportions, which I too admired with the wonder of the room that appeared to float within its white proportions, the furniture and pictures suspended within the space.
And how could I not wonder, the other guests at dinner John Fleming and Hugh Honour, why the roast chicken, which Patrick had prepared, had so many feathers left on it, which, however, he seemed not at all to be aware of, nor John and Hugh, but which Nikos and I smiled about across the elegantly laid table?
Patrick seems always to be in a vague state of suspension.
Sorting out papers, as I often do, because Nikos and I keep everything from postcards and invitations to exhibitions to letters and drafts of fiction, I came across a story that Jean Rhys and I wrote together after the incident in which, both of us drunk in her hotel room, I used the lavatory then she, and –
He heard, ‘Maurice!’
He went to the lavatory door and leaned close.
‘Maurice!’
‘Yes?’
‘Help me, please.’
His hand on the door handle, he hesitated. He opened slowly but quickly closed the door when he saw Lucy Nicholson holding her frock over her raised knees, her feet off the floor, her large, loose knickers about her ankles, leaning sideways, stuck in the toilet.
He had forgot to put the toilet seat down.
