Becoming a Londoner

by David Plante

  David Hockney comes to our flat, lounges on a chaise longue and answers questions Nikos asks him, which answers are recorded; Nikos has the tapes typed out then cuts himself out and arranges the text so it forms a narrative for a book. David has lively anecdotes to tell: how, on his first trip to Switzerland, he had looked forward to seeing the mountains, wanting to make a painting of them in ‘Gothic gloom,’ which he loves as much as Mediterranean or Californian; but, unfortunately, he didn’t see the mountains as he was in the back of a little van and thought it polite not to ask to sit in the front as this was the first time his friend had been to Europe, a shame, as he had so wanted to paint the mountains; yet, when he returned to London he did do a painting with made-up mountains, called Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape. He laughs a high bright laugh when he tells such anecdotes, and I hear them wishing I too had been in the back of a van unable to see the mountains and then be able to tell an anecdote about being in the back of a van and unable to see mountains.

  We asked Stephen and Francis to dinner. As if he had all the time in the world, Francis arrived before Stephen. In the living room, I asked him to sit, but he said, ‘No, I’ll stand. I like being uncomfortable.’

  At our small, oval dining table in a bedroom, Stephen asked Francis, ‘How old are you?’ Francis said, ‘I was born October 28, 1909, so I’m sixty-eight.’ ‘And I was born February 28, 1909,’ Stephen said. ‘So I’m six months older than you,’ Francis said. ‘Six months younger,’ Stephen said. Francis looked puzzled. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. Stephen said, ‘And you were in Berlin while I was there. I wonder why we didn’t meet.’ ‘We probably went to different places,’ Francis said; ‘I used to be in the clubs all the time.’ ‘So was I,’ Stephen said. ‘Then we were probably in the same club at the same time,’ Francis said.

  ‘How did you get to Berlin?’ I asked Francis.

  He seemed to like being asked questions about his life. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my father found me wearing my mother’s underclothes, and to put me right he sent me to a friend – like my father, a horse trainer. This was in Ireland. I left home to go with my father’s friend, who took me to Berlin. He was very rich and we stayed in a grand hotel. That was the first time I had sex with anyone. From there, I went to Paris. My mother sent me three pounds a week. I never really went back to Ireland.’

  Natasha’s mother has died. She spent her last days in Loudoun Road. After she died, Natasha was very apprehensive about reading her letters to her mother, worried that they would be filled with reproaches; but she found reading them that they were written with tenderness and love, and this came to her as a great moral relief.

  I recall Stephen once telling me that he and Natasha were in Germany just after the war, on a train; Natasha insisted that they change their pounds on the black market, and Stephen said, no, he’d rather the official rate, which made Natasha react by threatening to throw herself off the train and kill herself if he didn’t agree with her. I wonder if she does sometimes assert her will by threatening to kill herself. But how could I imagine this to be heroic, which I do? Leave aside whether or not Stephen was more admirable than Natasha in wanting to exchange pounds at the official rate (it is very much in Stephen to want to do this), I see her threat to kill herself as a way to assert her will within the whole of her past life, a past life she had to will herself to survive, and which she continues to will herself to survive.

  I’ve heard people say about Natasha that the best they can do is tolerate her because of Stephen, who suffers her will. These people, I feel, don’t see what an heroic struggle it is for Natasha simply to will herself to live, helpless as she is against a past life that she could easily have not survived.

  I once asked her if she was happy, and she said, ‘That is something I never consider.’

  She told me that there was a trying time when, inspired by the Farm Street Jesuit Martin D’Arcy, she thought of converting to the Roman Catholic Church, and read a good deal of theology about relinquishing one’s will to the will of God.

  After the death of W. H. Auden, whose funeral service she went to in Kirchstetten in the countryside of Austria, Sonia seems to have taken on caring for Chester Kallman, whom she invited Nikos and me to meet at a dinner party. He appears to have become Auden, in manners and speech, his features as pendulous as Auden’s.

  He lives in Athens, no doubt at Auden’s expense, and while Sonia was downstairs in the kitchen preparing a meal he told us that what he likes to do with Greek boys is have bubble baths with them, and I had the horrific vision of him, hump-backed and hump-stomached, in a large bath of three or more boys cavorting among foam and rising bubbles.

  A few days later he sent us a poem he had written on the death of a young Greek lover, a tender poem:

  How, darling, this innocent grief

  Must irk you, more

  Even than those outraged, mute

  Or pleading jealousies, though now

  This you are too pitiless to refute,

  Making me all you disapprove:

  Selfishly sodden, selfless, dirtier, a prodigal

  Discredit to our renewed belief in love:

  And addressing the dead! You’d laugh.

  Yet I can’t imagine you dead

  As I know you are and somehow

  Hold this one indulgence you allow,

  You who allowed me so much life.

  This was translated into Greek by Costas Tachtsis. I didn’t know that he and Chester Kallman knew each other, but more and more I expect people I meet to have themselves met one another.

  The time came for Nikos and me to move from Battersea into central London, partly because he had a long way to go to his office at Thames & Hudson, and partly because we had enough money now to move to a bigger flat in what I at least thought a nicer area of London. Nikos liked Battersea, liked the working-class shops and, too, the park just across Prince of Wales Drive, where we had picnics with friends. And, too, he said it was there that we created our lives together, painted the walls, bought furniture (some given to us by Johnny Craxton), hung our pictures, sewed curtains, and where, in our small sitting room we had so many drinks parties, and where in our smaller dining room we had so many dinner parties.

  Between the time we sold the flat in Battersea and were able to move into the one in Montagu Square, more or less around the corner from where we had met in Wyndham Place, we stayed in the pied-à-terre of Nikos’ cousin in Ovington Square, which to Nikos was like being homeless. This panicked him.

  He is always anticipating a catastrophe.

  He asks, Does he have cancer? No, I answer.

  Does he have a bad heart? No, I answer.

  Will he lose his job? No, I answer.

  Will the flat we’re supposed to move into be taken away from us? No.

  Will his kitties die? No.

  (He now has two cats, Jasmine and an offspring called Mustafa.)

  His uncertainty, often parodied by himself and made into a joke, fills me with affection for him and the desire to reassure him.

  But to truly reassure him would be to go back into his past and relieve him of the fear of belonging to a refugee family; his uncertainty, his sense of impending catastrophe, are in his history. I would like to undo his history, but cannot.

  In Montagu Square, we now live in a Georgian house, the top maisonette, overlooking a garden in the square. We have a key to the garden. The area of the house has black iron railings about it, and the front door, wide and shiny black, has a bright brass knob. We have had our furniture removed from Battersea, hung our pictures, organized books in especially built bookshelves, and each of us has a study. We have our bed from Battersea, the bed that means so much to Nikos, as if that, where we sleep night after night together, where we make love, is where our lives together are most our lives together.

  I sometimes dare to think Nikos is happy.

  He longs, he says, to stay in – no drinks parties, no dinner parties, neither ones we give nor ones we are
invited out to.

  He says, ‘Please, no socializing.’

  I should put in that since we last lived in Wyndham Place, the neighbourhood has changed, and where there was once a greengrocer where you could not buy green peppers because such a vegetable was too foreign, there is now a Lebanese grocery where vegetables and fruit are on sale that are totally foreign to us (thinking they were bananas, Nikos bought plantains), and where Nikos can buy Greek pasturma, halumi, feta cheese. The grocery is open on Sunday, as are all the grand department stores in Oxford Street.

  I forgot to put in that we now lived next to where Trollope lived and died.

  The story is: he was working on a novel but was so disturbed by a man playing hurdy-gurdy in the square, he raised the sash, leaned out, shouted that that abomination must stop, and had an apoplexy and died.

  A Sunday afternoon, Nikos and I walked about Hyde Park, and I was reminded of the times we used to walk there when we lived in Wyndham Place. I remembered how anxious I was, and how Nikos would say, ‘Now breathe in deeply, and look closely at what’s around you.’ The flowers in the parterres we walked along appeared to me dead. Now, walking along the same parterres, the flowers appeared brightly alive. I wondered about the difference between then and now. Perhaps we were closer then, not despite, but because of my mental illness, for it was an illness, and Nikos cured me.

  It is only at odd moments that I feel this flat is home. Nikos said he feels the same, that he imagines he is a guest in someone else’s flat. Then he said something that struck me as being true for myself as well as for him: that he doesn’t feel he belongs in such a posh, upper-middle-class neighbourhood. I can understand why I feel this, but he, used to his own upper-middle-class culture, should feel comfortable here, if somewhat disdainful. When we lived in Battersea and came into more central London on walks and passed through the kind of neighbourhood we now live in, Nikos, looking through the windows of elegant houses, would ask, ‘Why can’t we live in such a place?’ as if it were not simply a question of money but that we were not allowed. Again, I understand this in myself, but in Nikos I can only think his having felt more comfortable in working-class Battersea (where he liked to go to Clapham Junction to the working-class department store Arding & Hobbs for his socks and underwear), was because he felt he was not entitled to live in what friends now say is a ‘posh’ place, his sense of class in fact weak from coming from a refugee family who, though upper-middle class from Constantinople, were not accepted into middle-class Athens, so Nikos grew up feeling déclassé.

  We keep saying we want to be quiet in our new flat, but we see many, many people.

  I repeat once again the observation I have made over and over about our similarities and differences. If I am discontent, I blame myself (at a drinks party, I drank too much so have a hangover), whereas Nikos, discontent, blames the world (if people did not invite him out to a drinks party he wouldn’t drink so wouldn’t suffer a hangover, and he thereby puts the blame, not on himself, but on others inviting him out!).

  Sue Flanagan came to tea. She talked about herself and Barry. Barry, living away, wants a divorce, Sue doesn’t. I asked, ‘How can you know what Barry wants, given how convoluted his talk is?’ Sue said, ‘That’s because he didn’t learn to speak until he was eight or nine, but I understood him, he wants a divorce.’ ‘Why?’ ‘He says he is in love with someone else.’ ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’ Sue did laugh a quiet laugh. I told Sue that in fact I had met the woman, Ann, some time before at a drinks party, and she had said that she understands Barry and that with her he is perfectly clear when he talks, which she thought had to be a sign that something was going well between them. Sue said, ‘She’s a liar. I do understand Barry, I do.’ And I wondered about two women contesting their love for a man because they understood, one better than the other, what Barry meant by – as I recall him saying to me – ‘It’s a melon thrown at me from a truck driving at a hundred miles an hour.’

  That Nikos and I arrange books together, that we shop together, go to a recital together, makes these banal activities aspects of our relationship, imbues these activities with the multi-dimensional and in doing so imbues our relationship with the multi-dimensional. Our relationship needs these activities, I realize, in that the degree that they come alive in our performing them together is the degree that our relationship comes alive.

  Nikos has gone to bed. Now I’ll go to bed.

  I said to him today, ‘I really love this flat,’ and he said, ‘I do too.’

  I am alone in our flat, and I try not to think of anything but what is immediately about me, as I feel anxious in his absence and don’t want the anxiety to take hold of me, which it so easily can do when I am alone.

  I love London. In the morning, I went out to walk about the neighborhood, and everything appeared so vivid, as if I were seeing everything for the first time. The weather was gray and wet, and I loved this, too.

  New Year’s Eve, Roxy and I gave a party.

  Roxy: ‘I awoke one morning with the horrors, you know them, having an unstructured life, no job, just the round of parties, openings and movies, and realizing I’m not in love with the boyfriend, nor he with me, quel sadness, so I went back to bed for the rest of the day, sleeping heavily and now, a week later, I still feel dozy. But we shall have a wonderful party on New Year’s Eve. Do you think sandwiches and Christmas cake and tequila, or something more traditional like blinis and glasses of stout? Mr. Keogh from Dublin says the best poured glass of stout in London is to be had at the Catholic Martyrs Club in Aldgate.’

  Frank and Anita, that day back from Jerusalem, came to the party. Natasha, who had been so adamant on saving Frank’s first marriage to Maureen and so alienated herself from Anita, came, and was, as she would have said, on her ‘best behavior’ with Anita, and was affectionate towards me. Stephen is in New York. The poet Al Alvarez and the child psychiatrist Anne Alvarez came. Suzi. Sue Flanagan (she has split up from Barry). Joe and Jos Tilson. Old friends, old friends! In the Greek manner, I opened the windows at midnight, as we all drank sparkling wine, to let the old year out and the new year in.

  The day after, to Sylvia’s for supper. She said, ‘You’re in a very lively state. I wonder if, however much you love it, London will pull you down.’

  ‘But I’m in a lively state because I am in London,’ I said.

  I feel loving towards everyone.

  John Fleming, staying with us in Montagu Square, told us this, which we hadn’t known: one of the previous occupants of the house, married and with children and living in the country, would come up to London from time to time to stay in the flat and from there go to Piccadilly Circus and the arcade of flashing pinball machines and pick up boys and bring them back, one time a boy scout who went to the police, so the man was arrested. Charlotte Bonham Carter, hearing of this, shouted, ‘Those terrible, terrible boy scouts, they should be disbanded.’

  In what he calls the bottomless pit in the basement of Loudoun Road, where years of accumulations are stored, Stephen found an envelope with old photograph negatives which he had printed and which, to his surprise, revealed in black and white people he had known in Berlin. They include Stephen (taken by his brother Humphrey) and Christopher and his boyfriend and the original Sally Bowles, in fact Jean Ross, she standing full square in a loose smock and loose slacks and ballet slippers, a beret tipped to one side on her head, and she looking out at the camera with large dark eyes. Stephen gave us a set. The photographs taken in Weimar Berlin appeared to me to be representative of all of Weimar Berlin, as if all of that period of history was consciously being lived by those photographed – whereas, as I heard Christopher once say to Stephen, the boy in the photograph is not thinking of history but of a suit he hopes Stephen will give him, while Stephen is worried that he won’t have the money to buy the suit. Really, photographs, if seen as taken, not within history, but within the moment, demythologize history, and there is every reason to demythologize history when it is
as romanticized as Weimar Germany.

  We were, Nikos and I, collating the dates in our agendas, which we do every Sunday as it sometimes happens that he has written in a date when I haven’t, or vice versa, and we double date. I saw that he had written down, for lunch, Paul.

  I asked, ‘Paul who?’

  He laughed. He said, ‘My old friend Paul.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were having lunch with him.’

  ‘If I didn’t, it was because I didn’t think it was important enough to.’

  ‘Of course it’s important. He loved you and you made love together. Of course it’s important. And you were keeping it from me.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  ‘No, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not important.’

  ‘Of course it’s important that you should believe me.’

  This went on for a while, then I came up to my study and my desk to work, and he came in.

  He said, ‘You’ve got to trust me.’

  ‘I don’t, not entirely. You’ve destroyed letters in the past then conveniently forgotten what was in them so I wouldn’t know. Of course you’ve hidden things from me. But I have to recognize that you did this just so I wouldn’t be hurt. I accept that.’

  ‘You’ve got to trust me. I do tell you the truth.’

  ‘I don’t quite believe you.’

  He went out.

  Later, I went downstairs to find out what he was doing. We are always checking on what each other is doing, as out of curiosity. I found him in the kitchen preparing supper for John G. and James J. We hugged each other, then laughed. I left him, as he wanted to prepare the supper, and I went back to my desk, thinking, It doesn’t matter.

  Our downstairs neighbours in 38 Montagu Square are Joseph and Ruth Bromberg.