Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Wife/Wives

  At this point, if you are trying to picture the house, its layout, the way you walk in from the street past a bedroom door that won’t close (swollen timber), the storeroom (books, film cans, laundry) in which I worked, down a couple of crooked steps, kitchen (where I sat with Track), I should tell you about my wife. Wives. Historic. As I remember them. About the quirk of serial monogamy that I never managed, despite several never-to-be-repeated short-lived attempts, to suppress. I was faithful to the concept. And to the fact of the thing. There were no children, none that I was aware of, certified and living under my roof. But there was always a wife. The better part. A local mystery. Someone around, doing her thing, a steady beam of super-critical intelligence, unspoken support, to confirm as I woke in the marital bed that I was still the same person who fell asleep, book on face, the previous evening. Eight hours, precisely. Waking, to check the clock, at intervals that expanded incrementally through the night: forty minutes, one hour, one hour ten. Tossing, turning. Best sleep before dawn. Hearing her, whoever, enduring my horrors. Living my nightmares. That was the root of the trouble, out of sympathy (unfeigned), my wives walked in my sleep. Dreamt my dreams. They anticipated fictions and future territories – before, just before, I began to exploit them.

  I would get on pretty well with my first wife, the writer, I was sure of it – as soon as I found the third. That seems to be the rule, checking around, lecturers with access to the gene pool, painters like Jimmy Seed (taxable income): by the time they get out of the registry office with a bride who is two years younger than their eldest daughter, they’re best chums with the original. The church-married one (fellow student). The second wife is demonised, the bitch. Thief. Nympho. Big mistake. ‘She’s barking,’ they say. Using the new, young wife’s money (old wrecks trade up, socially, financially), they will have her predecessor committed. Then let out, chastened, scorched around the temples, sedated, to look after the kids. Second wives have a very rough time of it. But they can work out OK if the sequence stops there, at two: early mistake, impulsive passion, smoothed over. Bruises slowly healed. Long and blissful union between suitably tempered and experienced lovers.

  I was in that awkward stage of having lost one, mislaid another, and not knowing if I was going to have to go through it all a third time. Tempted, but wary, I wasn’t ready (yet) to dislike Hannah, my second, the psychotherapist. She might not have decamped, entirely; the stopover in the settlement-house in Bow might be no more than an overdue sabbatical. Problems to confront that were more dramatic than anything I could contrive. Space. A room of her own. And a view over the entrance ramp to the Blackwall Tunnel, the eastward sweep of the A13, the hallucinogenic glitz of Docklands. How could I compete with that? Erno Goldfinger’s grim tower block, once representing a beacon of blight glimpsed from the A102, now had a preservation order slapped on it; artists (video, light bulb) cohabited with media drones (cycling distance to Canary Wharf). One floor had been given over, by a council run with a sharp eye on public relations, to some of the more interesting dispersees from Victorian and Edwardian asylum colonies around the fringes of the M25 (Shenley to Belmont, to Horton and Long Grove in Epsom).

  Hannah, on the phone, taking in that glorious view, above the brown pollution belt, high in the troposphere, quoted the poet Douglas Oliver. Holes in the bedazzled.

  ‘Holes in the bedazzled,’ she said. ‘Who needs Hackney? There’s not one solitary person walking through this landscape. The river, the road. And light. I’m falling into the bedazzled. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

  My first time, with Ruth, was very much a case of falling into the bedazzled. We met at the Marylebone Magistrates’ Court. Upstairs, in the gallery. A dispiriting morning of pathetic hustlers, electrical-appliance thieves, sad prostitutes of both sexes. She had a friend up on a drugs charge (cannabis possession in Notting Hill, it was that long ago) and I was hanging about as part of a megalomaniacal project: I decided that I had to penetrate, or bear witness to, all the strands of urban society (mortuaries, abattoirs, law courts, Parliament, rag-trade sweatshops, white-lines-on-Hackney Marshes).

  I’d recently dropped out of the Courtauld Institute. I was enjoying it too much; contemplating Cézanne slides, dozing through discriminations of Cubism, soothed by the weird precision of Anthony Blunt delivering, on gin and tranquillisers, his annual Poussin sermon. I was too dumb to realise that all I needed to form a picture of the city, its machinations, corrupt establishments, smoothly oiled liaisons between disparate social groups, was here, under the dome. From Blunt’s eyrie to the marble hall with its checkerboard floor, grand staircase and fine art, this palazzo of privilege, training ground for Sotheby’s shysters and culture brokers, had the lot.

  Typical, I thought. I have the ant heap at my mercy, top to bottom (plenty of that), Queen Mum’s transvestite routs, Blunt’s rough-trade pick-ups (diversifying dockers), future ivory-finish novelists, the passport to the secrets of London – and I flounce out, nose in air. Graham Greene, Guy Burgess, Ronnie Kray, Lord Boothby, Anita Brookner, Brian Sewell: I missed them all. The men from MI5 and MI6, shuffling in through the tradesman’s entrance, pipes and macs, for their free tutorials. The Saturday night parties when the students were safely removed to South Ken, Fulham and Battersea.

  That quarter of the town, those pavements, wide, clean, disconcerted me. I couldn’t get the hang of it: how to walk without looking like a CCTV suspect, all hunch and hood. How to stroll without expectation of being shoved against the fence by a teenage toller, a crack fiend with a Stanley knife, a foam-flecked outpatient preaching madness. Manchester Square happened behind closed doors, padlocked gardens, quilted service flats fading into sepia. Assignations took place in the Wallace Collection; elderly romantics, creaking gentlemen and vamps with purple lips and nicotine teeth. Tired spies going through the motions in the last rites of a discredited system. Music and medicine, specialists in surgical and orthopaedic instruments. Blue-plaque Georgian properties leaking Schubert. Fetishist furniture, German, for the electively crippled. Sadists and masochists with the income to support their refined tastes.

  What had this to do with David Rodinsky? Rodinsky: the Whitechapel hermit, the mysterious figure who vanished from his locked room above a synagogue in Princelet Street, sometime in the Sixties. He left a friable London A-Z that was marked, in red Biro, with a number of routes, possible pilgrimages. One led to Claybury Hospital, where his sister died, the germination of the still-to-be-conceived M11. One meandered, in a fugue of forgetfulness, stopping and starting, through Dagenham. And another, the most enigmatic, moved from the ghetto, through Clerkenwell, over Holborn Viaduct, to Bloomsbury and Oxford Street. Why? What possible business had the orthodox scholar, holy fool, joker and accumulator of rubbish, with Portman Square, Manchester Square and the Courtauld Institute? A calendar with a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus hung on the greasy wall of Rodinsky’s garret. Did he, sniffling, snot on sleeve, attend an open lecture at the Institute? Did he know Blunt?

  These questions were far ahead of me when I met, and was dazzled, by Ruth. Do you know that stomach-turning shock of recognition? Impossible to take a breath, lift a hand. To speak in your own voice. Every detail of how she looked, brown top dressed with a clasp made from three small silver coins, grey skirt, stays with me, displacing a certain shape, shaping a hole that can never be filled. The way she sat, crossed her legs. The hair. The turn, the smile. I wouldn’t have said, before this coup de foudre, that she was my type – if I had a type, beyond the waifs and strays, pub occasionals who would break away from the group for a single unremarkable night. Hair (infrequently washed), long and tangled. Mascara. Eyes like a road accident. Black clothes or improvised layers of fabric, charity-shop coats. Yellow fingers. That smell of multiple-occupation chenille and patchouli oil. Drink you into a coma. Tears at bedtime. I had to fake the cruelty they were searching for, the stamina to listen to the tale.

  During those few, unreal weeks at the Co
urtauld, a pattern was set; the weather was good, autumnal, provocative, and I walked, after lectures, for hours through quarters of London that I’d previously seen through the windows of moving vehicles. The people who lived here were invisible. The ones I noticed were, like myself, tolerated visitors: tourists, Arabs, gallery users with undeclared motives, the diseased and damaged soliciting verdicts, panaceas of expensive furniture, heavy curtains. Tanned specialists with clean fingernails and pocket handkerchiefs that matched their heavy silk ties (in the style perfected by Lord Bragg).

  I took Ruth to the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. There might have been some loose cultural connection between John Golding’s lectures on Cubism and my instinct to wander through this quiet building with its walls of tribal masks and glass cabinets of delicate whalebone carvings. It was where I spent most of my afternoons; drifting through the galleries, scribbling illegible phrases and uncertain facts in my red notebook, thinking about my great-grandfather’s expedition up the Rio Perene. I meditated an impossible and very soon abandoned work in which I would blend – in imitation of Paul Metcalf (great-grandson of Herman Melville) – Peruvian travel journals from the nineteenth century with lecture notes on Cézanne’s obsessive reconfiguring of Mont Sainte-Victoire (the thing seen from a pine-fringed distance, his Beckton Alp), and walks taken through the topography of Mayfair and Marylebone. In Metcalf’s 1971 book, Patagoni, he shifts very smoothly from the Detroit of Henry Ford to his own Peruvian journals: ‘A man is anxious, restless, a pressure on the breast – the frame shudders, limbs tremble.’ It can’t have been easy, I thought, to have Melville peering over your shoulder.

  We left the court together and, later, the pub. Ruth’s friend escaped with a fine. Back in Westbourne Park, they picked up a few mates and headed off to a dive at the scruffy end of Portobello Road. I wasn’t fond of the area, even then, but I tagged along. Drinks on the table, they lit up: part of the general amnesty. Traders with gear to sell, wobbly writers, sessions men between sessions. Ruth didn’t do pints, as the others did, regularly on the quarter-hour; she hugged the joint. The afternoon stretched.

  Talking, we brought our conversation out into the street, away from the others, routes I didn’t know. We wandered through the park to her basement flat in Cornwall Gardens. Straight to bed. And stayed there for the weekend (the sheets had pale-yellow stripes). At some point on Saturday afternoon, when I slipped out for food (rollmops, crusty bread, cheese in plastic, two leaking cartons of that exotic culinary newcomer, yoghurt), I made up my mind. I asked her to marry me.

  Better to marry than to yearn.

  Ruth suffered from several disadvantages that I was prepared to overlook: she was English, a country family, Lincolnshire. Established and orthodox in opinions. She’d done school, university, a pass at Goa, and was now working in the office of an impressively foul architect, somewhere in Paddington. In London, she never ventured east of Tottenham Court Road. She wouldn’t give me an answer, too politic to make a decision in the derangement of the present, rumpled sheets, pillows on floor, shared bath, midnight coffee and rolls in the Cromwell Road Air Terminal.

  She didn’t know anything about Marcuse or Foucault, had never heard of Jung or Brecht, never read The Waste Land. Never been a member of CND or the Trots. I thought she was joking, it was too good to be true. None of that stuff came up until we’d been together for a couple of months, Chinese restaurants, bistros like the Ark in – where was it – Palace Gardens Terrace? Not far from Bernard Stone’s poetry bookshop. And the guy who sold Aleister Crowley material to Jimmy Page.

  Black-and-white photos of Parisian vagrants on bamboo walls. Beef stews with French names, cheap red wine.

  Males couldn’t help themselves. They stared at Ruth, waiters in aprons and advertising men in loud striped shirts. Noise levels dropped as hearts missed a beat. I stared too, when I could, her reflection in speckled mirrors. Through curtains of smoke and noise, I listened to her life, the factored anecdotes. Small confessions. Her sense of family. Men trailed after Ruth in the street. Knocked, late or early, at our door; dry-mouthed, twisting with awkwardness, they asked her out. Asked her to pose. Offered modelling contracts. Film parts. Begged her to move in with them. She had a particular appeal for large, smiling Nigerians and thick-necked squires in hairy suits.

  Women like Ruth happen once in a generation.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re on.’

  She gave me her answer in the pre-Colombian room at the Museum of Mankind. Grave goods: monkeys with spouts coming out of their heads, panther pots, shallow red-brown dishes, bloodstained idols whose concentrated malignancy shone through the glass. Through time. Aztec, Toltec, Maya. She said, yes. Yes. Against, I felt, the spirit of this place, the still-potent negation. The stopping of the sun’s pump. We kissed, opened our mouths. She came back, for the first time, to Hackney.

  While she continued to take the bus to the architect’s office, everything was fine. I had the house to myself. I hacked away at film reviews for Time Out, research projects for published writers, uncredited script rewrites. Afternoon strolls to Mare Street Library or along the canal. We shared a glass or two of wine in the evening and I nodded over the horrors and humiliations of her day, before improvising a meal from leftovers. In summer, we sat out on the stoop, waiting for the stars. Friends came around for meals. Otherwise: we went to bed early and slept close.

  It started to go wrong, I’m ashamed to say, when a shiny yellow Jiffy bag arrived; Ruth’s maiden name on the printed label of a respected independent publisher. She was at work. I opened the package, ‘in error’, and found a proof copy of her first novel. She’d written the book on the bus, travelling backwards and forwards to work. I was mortified at the betrayal, her secret life, and spent the rest of the day rehearsing my spontaneous enthusiasm at the wonderful news. I even bought a bottle of Spanish fizz.

  Then we were both at home, writing. We couldn’t discuss our projects over the reheated spaghetti. Ruth was modest, superstitious of outlining a plot before it was properly cooked. I was blocked (Jack Nicholson in The Shining – without the Yukon shirt and wolf grin). I sat at my desk reading other writers, making collages of quotations.

  Susan Sontag: ‘To quote from a movie is not the same as quoting from a book.’

  The house shrunk around us. I assembled monster files of cuttings and photographs, everything that could be known about the worst of London, the A13. Company histories, geologists’ reports, traffic-flow statistics, gangland memoirs. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds over Plaistow. I walked the Northern Sewage Outflow. I haunted burial grounds. I cycled along scummy canals and lost rivers. If I found a good pub, a promising ruin, I came back with Ruth. I shared the best of my research, the bits you’d highlight in an off-beat guide book. And I suppressed the evil stuff. Hoarded it for use at some future date.

  My spoiling tactics worked, no second novel appeared. I smothered Ruth in sympathy, let her waste the grit that might have made a pearl. She couldn’t lose face by returning to the office. She took on a series of short-term jobs: bus driver (outpatients and special-needs citizens), cook in a children’s hospital (she never tried it at home), tending flower beds in Victoria Park, compiling useless statistics for the fudging of government white papers. But this was worse than before. Ruth was out there, archiving the city, getting her hands dirty, acquiring at first hand information I had to dig from books and newspaper archives, depressed local libraries.

  I started to hang out with a cell of leftover Laingians, remnants of the Kingsley Hall settlement, marooned in Bow – with no collateral beyond tall tales about the final excesses of David Cooper, face-down in a foil tray: game over. They fought like cats and dogs. Letters of resignation were waved around like final demands from Hackney Council. The psychotherapists and free-range social workers certainly knew how to hate. Tenderly, they cultivated discriminations of slight, never-forgotten gestures, insultingly positioned cups of tea. Their days were spent composin
g rebuttals for injuries that had not yet been attempted. They were always looking for worse properties, on the edge of chaos, in which to set up independent principalities (where they could strut like cardinals). They auditioned crazies. Nobody was mad enough. Shit-painters trumped by swallowers of cutlery. Spoon-chewers devalued by men who set fire to their hair and ran naked after buses.

  I became a sort of unofficial freak-wrangler, shunting visionaries, poets and all manner of the urban possessed, towards these very unsafe havens. Hannah rewarded me, for the gift of a ketamine-addicted multiple-personality railwayman (who could – and did – recite the whole of Sax Rohmer’s 1919 shocker, Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic), with a bone-shuddering, marrow-sucking blow job.

  Women in antique markets took Ruth for Jewish, she had a thing for jewellery, scarves, hats, pink or yellow stockings. Her colouring was slightly sallow, Mediterranean, and she had lovely almond eyes, a generous mouth. The faintest of moustaches. But she was turnip-belt England: peasant to tenant farmer, to gent, to over-educated middle-class unemployable, in three generations. Hannah, on the other hand, was the genuine article, a London mongrel: Jewish, German, Polish, Irish, Geordie. Every piece of her arguing with its neighbour, heart and soul, vendettas, battles for and against the dispossessed, slapping kicking gouging attacks – instantly healed in hot embraces. She danced in notorious breeze-block clubs, with Yardies and Rastas, until her feet bled.

  There was no row. Ruth didn’t know about Hannah. Hannah didn’t concern herself with Ruth. Things muddled along as usual. And then, one evening, Ruth didn’t come home. There were no calls. I declined to check out the new hotels around Waltham Abbey (roundabouts off the M25), where she told me she was attending a workshop for health-food reps. A few weeks later, after I’d tidied away Ruth’s stuff, put it in storage, Hannah moved in. And madness became the stuff of my existence. Bigamy was the least of it.