Visible to a crone in black. Who, as a young girl, had carried up his breakfast tray when the shakes were on and he couldn’t find the strength to come downstairs. To make the performance, magus of the cold meats. Servant of Satan.
Even for those who love photographs, there comes a point of album fatigue. Too many beards, too many brides. Too many beaches. The faces of the dead, curated by the dying, solicit one last hurrah: remember me.
Arthur Norton with his laughter lines, hair, watchchain: I couldn’t find anything to connect us. Paterfamilias. Property owner. Wife, children, servants. Arranged, time and again, for local photographers: E. Geering and Alexander Wilkie (615 Gt Northern Road, Aberdeen). Slender daughters, sons in kilts (the future Nostromoner has a fat book in his lap).
But one card, tissue wrapped, was of a different order: a portrait taken by a photographer who actually looked at Arthur, wondered what he was about and how to present him.
‘San Francisco, we think,’ Winnie said. ‘It’s inscribed but I can’t make out the signature. Before the earthquake.’
‘I didn’t know Arthur was in San Francisco?’
‘On his way, my husband decided, to Central America. Before Peru. I want you to have it. And the camera. You still do the writing?’
‘I’d like to give it another shot, yes. Sometime.’
‘Come back, please,’ Winnie said. To Ollie. ‘I like you very much. Bring your young chap. Or we could meet in town. Don’t ring, I’m a little bit deaf. Just come when you fancy it, a lovely walk. Do come, dear. Goodbye, Andrew.’
I gave Ollie my keys. She was prepared (and qualified) to develop the film that had been lodged in the black box of that camera for over a hundred years. The instrument was the twin of the Kodak used by Bram Stoker’s Jonathan Harker when he was prospecting for property investments in Thames Gateway on behalf of an overseas client, Count Dracula. Harker got there more than a hundred years ahead of Jimmy Seed.
‘I have taken with my kodak views of it,’ he wrote in his journal. Carfax Abbey, Purfleet. ‘There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum.’
Arthur Norton’s Peruvian film was the escape clause for my disintegrating fiction. Leave it with Ollie. She was right, I didn’t deserve her. Give her to Kaporal, the better man. He would walk alongside this young woman to Cunard Court, take her to my flat. Then cook a meal, spaghetti with all the trimmings, while she converted my shower-cupboard into a darkroom.
What was the final entry in Arthur’s journal? A ravine: precipitous cliffs above, perpendicular rocks below, a roaring torrent at the bottom of the gorge, on the margin of which we could see gold-seekers washing out the mud.
Arthur’s party, diminished, exhausted, make camp. The gold-seekers offer no hospitality. The Indians vanish in the night. There is a cave in which Arthur finds shelter against a tropical downpour. The smell forbids sleep. A poisonous gas that no bird or beast can live near. Rats running across the puddled floor drop down dead; the snake that pursues them shares the same fate; while birds flying above drop down and fly no more. The place is fatal to birds, vermin, and all creeping creatures who come across it.
Now we were so close to a solution, I had to distance myself from the action. Give Ollie time to do her work. I was like an expectant father. I needed somewhere to pace, a bench on which to enjoy a cigar. This wouldn’t be easy. I had a superstition about sitting on anything with a memorial plate: no names, dates, no more views (favourite or otherwise). The Hastings Museum then. Let Ollie take the direct route, the steep descent; I’ll sidle, meander over nursery slopes, to the gallery in the park. Another encounter with my old friend, Harbour Scene with Yachts by Keith Baynes.
Because, very soon, one bright day, without warning, the painting won’t be there: not for me. My good eye had closed and the weak one was murky. I couldn’t face the operations, forms, bills, writing time lost. Baynes made colour you could taste, he was the Marine Ices of seascapes: buttery chalk, chocolate chip, melon green. He taught your eyes to salivate.
His story, like the myths of the chopped-up parson, the Brink’s- Mat gold, would never be resolved. There were no hard facts, no secrets in museum files. But the gallery in which his painting hung was a fine place to visit, romancers and their circumscribed visions: the same shore with different characters. The same characters in different hats.
There was never anybody in the gallery. Before today.
‘Have you noticed,’ the woman said, ‘those pencil marks? Go on, get in close. There. And again there. Top right, vertical. Bottom left, horizontal. Framing marks – which the framer ignored? A hint of the missing window?’
She was tall. I liked the scent of her.
The Baynes painting was swimming. I was losing it, colour without form.
Hat and decorative veil. Was this vision a wedding guest? Plum suede skirt with slash to show off the legs. Ankle-boots. Complicated scarves, rings, bangles. She was in good nick, but older than I had imagined – about my own age. The woman from the Bo-Peep Inn. The one who left typewritten stories at my door.
‘Marina,’ she said. ‘Marina Fountain.’
And she shook my hand.
Royal Victoria Hotel
Walking down through the gardens with Marina Fountain, skateboard ramps, White Queen Theatre and on to the Grand Parade, felt right. The fret was stopped in me, the constant self-interrogation: a break in consciousness whereby old arguments faded into the tidal drag (motorway sound slowed to the point where it soothes). A skinned and glittering sea. The tottering hulk of Cunard Court as a reassuring ghost: deserted ballroom, cracked swimming pool (filled with bags of cement, mounds of sand), rusty balconies. One light on the seventh floor.
‘Let Ollie finish the developing. We’ll have a drink.’
I didn’t say it. She knew what I was thinking. She knew the men from the Adelphi Hotel, pacing, agitated on cell phones. Drinkers, dispersed from their favoured sites on the lower walk, opposite the theatre, had atomised into smaller groups; ciderheads, dark-blue lager tins, silver tins. One school hung around the Gents, shirts out, ruddy, swaying and singing, a piss party. A family group with dogs and babies staked out the bus shelter. Trios, couples and solitaries balkanised alcoves, tactfully organised along the shingle’s edge, carpets of pale-orange butts, punctured cans. ‘Marina Marina Marina.’
They clinked in her honour. One of them tried to stand up, to kiss her hand. ‘Have a wet, Marina. See yus Marina. Right, Marina, right?’
I assumed, with no good reason, that she lived in Cunard Court. Where else? That retro look. Those legs.
‘I know where Baynes painted that view,’ she said. We paused alongside the weather station: a decision about that drink would have to be made, the venue. Marina made it.
‘Which floor?’ I asked.
It didn’t matter. My book was never going to work. I couldn’t pull it together; as usual I’d gathered far too much material -incontinent research, undisciplined, reckless, a pyramid made from worms.
‘Tell you on one condition.’
‘What?’
‘You take me dancing.’
My knees were gone. My legs belonged on an Edwardian billiard table. It had been years. I came from the wrong era. Proper dancing vanished with National Service.
The Royal Victoria Hotel, that iced cake with the tattered Union Flag, had a piano and a cocktail pianist with Jerry Lee Lewis hair and a greasy tux, the shakes under control, a limited repertoire: each golden oldie more depressing than the last. Unlikely couples with bottled tans, leftover from the days when TV announcers wore dinner jackets, went through the moves with robotic precision, before subsiding into their gilded coffins.
‘I love to dance. Remember?’
Almost.
A warped Polaroid. A small fantasy: she touched my arm, coming through the streets of Notting Hill, late, after a boozy meal, in a cocoon of unconcern; knowing ourselves, one through
the other, not knowing how it would go, what form our lovemaking would take.
Were we old enough – to dance? Old in habits, certainly. I scanned the ads in the newsagent’s window, before he could pull down the shutters. Historic steel boat once owned by Edith Piaf. Diesel Engine. 3 berths. A photograph. Like a Dunkirk survivor. Seen some parties, that one, dancing to a portable radio on French rivers. We should learn how to leave the past alone, let light decay at its own volition. Maybe those New Puritans were right: no back story, no complexity, no adjectives.‘A man walks up to the bar and orders
Leave Ollie and Kaporal alone. Take them out of the story. Junk the A13 material. Grant Arthur Norton’s Peruvian journey its intrinsic mystery. He was there, he vanished. So what? Nothing to do with me. I don’t want the prints from the Kodak. I’ll dance. We’ll have a few drinks, walk across the road to the sea. You can still hear the piano from the hotel. Full moon. Crane up. Audience restless, glutted with references. Overload. Make it simple. Man, woman, bench. Finish.
I searched for the bar, someone had moved it (from its position in Marina’s typescript). As in a temperance hotel, it had been hidden: alcohol available – if strictly necessary -on prescription. The barman was a person of restricted growth who had left a travelling circus and found steady employment staying out of sight. His eyes glared at you between the olives and the dead peanuts.
‘Two gin and tonics. Please.’
‘Ice and lemon?’
He made it sound like a perversion.
‘No,’ I said. I didn’t have time to watch him mount his block, juggle with cubes, claw a sacrificial citrus fruit and massacre it with nail scissors.
Before I could sneak a look inside her bulging leather satchel, Marina returned from her face-repair operation. I wouldn’t have done it anyway. I didn’t want to know. For the first time, in months, I was perfectly content to be where I was: soft chair, attractive woman, warm gin.
‘Keith Baynes worked from Cunard Court, it’s true. You must have seen View from My Window, St Leonards (c. 1965) in the Hastings Museum catalogue. No middle distance: sofa, yachts. But that other, madder sequence, with the agitated cushions, choppy sea
It wasn’t just her face, the whole look had received a major rethink. I thought I was safe with the ankle-boots, she couldn’t dance in those. Marina had executed a complete costume change, Cyd Charisse heels, gardenia in hair, a spangly black number that flashed like a case of eels.
‘It’s our song.’
I held her, I knew that much. The white piano sounded like ice cubes dropping into a tin bath. Marina was enjoying herself. We performed – without flourishes, twirls, the moves you used to see illustrated in the picture strips, footprints only, with little arrows: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one. She tucked her head on my shoulder: smoke and soap, nothing that helped me fix my memories of a past that hadn’t yet happened.
‘Baynes kept a room in this hotel. He entertained. So the skewed perspective makes sense: it never was Cunard Court. And there’s something else. He fell out of a tree as a kid, haemorrhaged, lost the sight of one eye.’
I shouldn’t squeeze so hard. I knew how easily Marina bruised. Knew? I met the woman for the first time today. Orange-brown marks slowly darkening, as fingerprints faded in the flesh of her arms, the remembered intensity of an afternoon encounter.
‘A career of inaction,’ Marina said. ‘The doctors advised him to live quietly in the country, on the coast. Close enough to imagine France, but not close enough to experience it: drains, garlic, muscular sailors in striped vests.’
‘Blind in one eye?’
‘Nice man, by all accounts. Slightly bewildered, they say, by what was happening around him. Never quite sure if the yachts had sailed into his room, or if he had drifted out to join them.’
His friend Othon Friesz reported: ‘Light is sometimes arbitrary and shadows omitted.’
One-eyed visions from an English hotel. Displacement strategies made possible by a private income too modest to draw attention to itself.
We returned to our table. I collected another round. Marina was smoking. She didn’t share my inhibitions; she’d taken the portrait of Arthur Norton, the one from San Francisco, out of my bag, and she was twisting it around in her hands (purple-black nails), holding it close, holding it away. Everything short of licking it for flavour.
‘Of interest?’ I asked. I too had my secrets.
‘Another dance. I’m enjoying myself. You think that’s supposed to be Latin-American?’
She could carry it off, with her look, Mediterranean, sallow on the fresh side of jaundice, but it was too much for me. Marina didn’t have natural rhythm, she had style: she shimmered. Men watched her. Women watched her. It never fades. I kept out of the way, making random gestures with my arms, listening to my joints creak.
‘My great-grandfather,’ I said. When we collapsed at the table. ‘Arthur Norton. In San Francisco? I have no idea what he was doing there.’
‘I know,’ Marina replied. ‘Read this while I freshen our drinks.’
She made it easy. Passages marked with coloured stickers. Yet another book. Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge by Rebecca Solnit. Muybridge, the stop-motion man, inspiration for Duchamp and Francis Bacon, didn’t do portraits. What possible connection could there be with Arthur, the card that Marina was busily interrogating?
I ignored her markers and flicked idly through reproductions of naked women with basins of water, an old man (Muybridge himself) marching with formidable length of stride (fit but mad), a group of Shoshone Indians squatting alongside the Central Pacific Railroad. Great images. But no trace, thank god, of the Norton portrait. Muybridge kept the world at a distance, clouds, athletes, urban panoramas. Solnit had picked a good subject.
‘Rebecca’s a chum.’
Marina, saving time, brought the bottle.
‘I stayed with her in San Francisco. She took me on the Muybridge trail. Read page forty-two. Then go back to thirty-five.’
‘Later, perhaps.’
‘Now, read it. Then we’ll go up to my room. The one in which Baynes used to stay.’
He documented several groups of Native Americans, a few Chinese miners and city dwellers but made no known portraits. His photograph of Emperor Norton on a bicycle is as close as he got – literally as close, for though Muybridge photographed individuals a few more times and made hundreds of motion studies of men and women, he never photographed anyone as close-up as portraiture requires, never depicted them as expressive faces rather than representative bodies. It says much about him that he always kept his distance.
‘Norton? “Emperor” Norton? Who is that?’
I had to know, the irrational impulse that keeps you going, to the very last page, when you understand, deep down, there is nothing ahead: banal twist, tawdry revelation, fraudulent closure.
‘Norton is as close as Muybridge ever came to taking a portrait.’
The absurdity of this man’s imperial title made me think of Conrad’s silver-financed Central American republic (ingots shipped directly to San Francisco). It brought back my conman ancestor, Sir Gregor MacGregor, ‘Cazique’ of the Mosquito Coast. I fell for it, I reached for Marina’s slender pink marker.
Norton, an English Jew who came to California via South Africa, initially made a fortune speculating in foodstuffs. In 1853, he tried to corner the rice market at twelve cents a pound, only to be ruined when Peruvian ships sailed in full of rice at three cents a pound. He apparently cracked under the strain of the crisis, then re-emerged in 1859 with a proclamation he gave to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin to publish, announcing he was emperor of the United States. Later he added ‘and Protector of Mexico’ to his title … He wandered the city, graciously receiving homage, chastising the disrespectful, and taking tribute in the form of free meals, free clothes, and small sums of money given for his irredeemable bonds, printed free by local shops. His career as emperor was made by the collusi
on of the citizens of San Francisco and the newspapers that published his edicts, the accounts of his fantastic and entirely fictitious travels to Ceylon, Australia, Tasmania and Peru. In the photograph Muybridge made of Norton sitting on a bicycle in the late 1860s, he is a solid middle-aged man looking down at his handle-bars with a frown of concentration, more serious than his gaudy uniform with its tarnished epaulets.
I undressed quickly and waited, trying not to yawn, while Marina went through the familiar rituals of preparation: knickers chucked away, the struggle to unfasten the dress (that might require my help), the sitting on the edge of the bed to unroll her stockings, shoes back on, selects a fresh pair of knickers (drawer left open), walks to window, no urgency, curtains open, full moon over the sea, the same expectations, her feet so cold when she does climb into bed, under the sheets.
It would sort itself out, eventually. The Norton story. The film Ollie was processing didn’t matter. Emperor Norton never made it to Peru. The family fortune wasn’t lost to the sharks of the financial markets: he was the crook, the spinner of fictions. A ganef, a schnorrer. A tolerated joke. Walking to hide his shame in pretended madness – until that became the only real thing about him. Ruritanian uniform and antique bicycle. A near portrait by Eadweard Muybridge: a man who, like William Burroughs, kills his wife and gets away with it. Who changes his name more often than his socks (Muggeridge, Muygridge, Helios, Eduardo Santiago Muybridge). Who changes his personality, a double life brought on by a stagecoach crash.
I found a scar on my head. I had a double vision – saw two objects at once; had no sense of smell or taste; also had confused ideas … Then I went to London and consulted a physician named Gull.
Gull? Sir William. Royal physician and Ripper suspect. Gull specialises in injuries to the brain (Stephen Knight, who wrote a book denouncing the Masonic conspiracy, died of a tumour). Gull advises healthy outdoor activity, Muybridge begins to photograph landscape, cumbersome equipment dragged over the west, Yosemite. (Yo! Semite. Yo! Norton.)
Dining on Stones Page 41
