by Robert Irwin
I scratched my head. Certainly I could make very little of this stuff by Schopenhauer. I suspected that beneath her pose of intellectual aloofness and irony, Monica was actually rather offended by my revelation that Oliver made free with her bum in his novel. Monica had signed herself off affectionately and then added a postscript. ‘God knows what Caroline will make of all this – if she is still alive’.
I was still debating how to reply to Monica’s letter when, two weeks later, I received a postcard. I recognised the handwriting before I had succeeded in deciphering a word and I had to put the card down and wait until my heart had stopped racing madly, before picking it up and reading;
‘Dearest Caspar,
‘If you would like to see us, come to the Pavilion Tea Room in Battersea Park next Tuesday at 4 o’clock. It would be super to see you there.
Lots of love,
Caroline.’
So after all these months my long anti-memoire had succeeded in giving birth to this tiny postcard! There were four days to go and, once I had received the card, I could neither paint nor draw. My hands shook all the time and I could not even keep the image of Marcel steady on my retina. I smoked and paced about the house, preparing and discarding emotional positions. Having, after so many efforts and so many years, lured her back to me, I surely could not afford to let her slip her away from me again.
On the Tuesday I was unable to face lunch and I set out early, walking along the river from Waterloo towards Battersea Park. It was a desolate journey. The Festival of Britain had been concluded in September 1951 with Gracie Fields singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to a great crowd on the riverside. A couple of weeks after that the workmen went in and set to demolishing the pavilions and restaurants. The Festival Hall itself and the great funfair in Battersea Park were the only parts of the Festival to be left untouched by the demolition teams. Walking westwards from the former site of the Festival, now a sea of mud and rubble, one entered into a nightmare territory of craters and curiously shaped ridges, gullies and towers. During the War, the glittering moonlit surface of the Thames had guided the German bombers into London and the damage they had wreaked on the southern edge of the river was spectacular. I liked what I saw. Though I walked amidst ruins, yet I felt no grief about what had vanished. In my opinion the Blitz had done London a favour by thinning out our ghastly legacy of dark and depressing Victorian architecture.
As I picked my way through the rubble, I tried to rehearse things I should say to Caroline, but since I had no idea what sort of person I should be speaking to, where she had been or what she had been doing, this was difficult – like preparing the defence in a trial where the state was refusing to let the defendant know what he was accused of. Lines from sentimental old films came and went in my head, lines like, ‘Well, we’ll always have Paris’.
I was also worried about whether I would recognise Caroline. Would she appear in a nun’s habit? Or in a wheelchair? Would some obese lady, overladen with pearls, step out of a Rolls-Royce? And what was the ‘us’ the card referred to? I entertained fantasies of two Carolines, or even twenty or thirty Carolines, holding hands in a neat little crocodile and proceeding across the park towards me.
I entered the park over two hours in advance of our appointed meeting time. I had the mad idea that she might be similarly impatient and arrive early too. In the meantime I wandered round the fairground and admired everything: the Giant Caterpillar, the Big Dipper, the Tunnel of Love, Moggo the Largest Cat Alive, Sleipnir the Eight-Footed Horse, Mr K the Hunger Artist, the Punch and Judy Show, the Girl Kept Alive in a Block of Ice and the Hall of Mirrors. All of London should look like a fairground and the red and gold horses with distended nostrils and flared lips would career round the carousel and the women pinned to the walls of the hurtling rotor would be unable to prevent the billowing up of their skirts and the ping-pong balls in the rifle range would dance perpetually on their air-jets. Always faster and madder. London moves too slowly. But I loved the fairground. The gold-framed scrollwork on the fronts of the booths and rides was as gaudy as a mandrill’s arse and my eyes were saturated in their colour.
Even so, though I lingered drunk with brightness and movement, for as long as I could in the fairground, I was still almost half an hour early when I settled under the brightly striped canopy of the Pavilion Tea Room. As I sat trying to get a waitress to take my order, the fairground began to disappear in the gathering dusk and mist. The air was very damp, not quite drizzle. Sitting in the cafe, sipping tea (which I hated) I felt a little like a secret agent who pretends to be merely idling while he is in fact waiting to receive vital intelligence. Any one of the people now approaching the Pavilion Tea Room might be my hitherto unidentified contact. That man in a Homburg and a thick dark overcoat might be Caroline heavily disguised, or that batty looking woman with her hair still eccentrically in curlers, or that park warden in a stiff serge uniform …
In the end she surprised me by coming up from behind. Before I quite knew what was happening, she kissed me swiftly on the cheek and lowered herself warily into the chair opposite me.
‘Hello Caspar.’
I had to catch my breath. She is so beautiful. It is strange to say, but for an instant I did not recognise her and I think that was because, contrary to my expectations, she had hardly changed at all. She was bigger than I had remembered her. That is true. But this was not because she had put on any weight, but only that over the years she had been shrinking in my memory, as if I had been remembering her down the wrong end of a telescope. She was still slim and there were only the faintest traces of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She wore a heavy tweed jacket and skirt. A large gold brooch was attached to her white blouse, yet, despite this somewhat matronly dress, she could still have been taken for a young girl. She uneasily crossed and uncrossed her legs.
‘Well, aren’t you going to say something? Like “Hello Caroline?” I got the impression from your book that you wanted to see me and talk to me.’
‘Hello Caroline,’ I said. ‘You are alone?’
‘Yes, well, Oliver is here somewhere, but he thought that I should talk to you first. He’s a bit frightened of you, you know. He thought that you might have brought the swordstick along. He’s taking Ozzy round the funfair.’
‘Ozzy?’
‘Yes. Ozzy is our son. Oliver hopes that Ozzy will become a conjuror too. Ozymandias is a good name for a conjuror.’
‘How old is Ozzy?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she said vaguely. ‘Fifteen or sixteen, I think.’
‘All these years …’ I began, but I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence.
‘Yes, it’s been a long time,’ she said. She tilted her head at that characteristically quizzical angle. Then looking at me intently.
‘Your book hurt me, you know. It was like that first painting you did of me, “Striptease”. I felt – still feel – as if I had been undressed, as if I was dirty, even a bit of a bitch. If you loved me, I can’t think why you wrote it.’
‘I wanted to see you again, Caroline.’
‘Yes, well …’ Then her expression softened. (It hurt me that afternoon to see how her expression softened whenever she thought of Oliver.) She smiled.
‘Oliver thought your book was very good. He thought it was a hoot. He just lay back and roared. What Oliver says is that you have always been a literary sort of painter. He thinks that you shouldn’t have become a painter at all. You should have been a writer. He says that Exquisite Corpse is more like a novel than anything else. It’s not just you. Oliver says that all Surrealist painting is like that – awfully literary. What do you think?’
But I did not reply and very soon Caroline gave up trying to get me to talk. I just sat there, feeding on her beauty with my eyes, while she related the story of her life without me. As she talked, I found myself anticipating what she would say next. It was all so inevitable. I might have guessed. Perhaps I did guess, but, if so, I had kept that guess secret from m
yself.
At first, when she met me Caroline had been fond of me – no, more than fond, she had indeed loved me. Then there was that trip to Brighton with the Eluards, Gala, Marcia, Jorge and Oliver. Oliver had sat on the shingle madly talking about his love for an imaginary vampire called Stella. It was nonsense of course – or rather not nonsense but a kind of code, couched in the form of a fantasy story. Oliver had fallen in love with Caroline. Perhaps he had done so the first time he saw her, but if so, he only became aware of his passion for her that morning on Brighton beach when she recited Baudelaire. Then, as he sat talking on the beach about Stella, Caroline intuited that he was talking to no one but to her and about no one but her and something in her responded to Oliver’s bizarrely couched declaration of love.
At first she had tried to resist, but Oliver had deluged her with notes and flowers and, on evenings when he knew I would be elsewhere, he had waited for her outside her office. It was not long before she realised that she did not really want to resist. One evening, without warning, she went to visit Oliver in his flat in Tottenham Court Road and there on the red divan, supposedly reserved for the visitations of the vampire woman, Oliver and Caroline, both of them virgins, made love for the first time.
‘Did you really not spot it?’ said Caroline at this point. ‘Stella’s face might have been pinched from Felix and her bum from Monica, but Stella, the essential Stella, was and is me. I am Oliver’s vampire and I feed on his amazing passion and energy. The Vampire of Surrealism is one long love letter from Oliver to me.’
‘I thought he was homosexual,’ I said stupidly. ‘We all did. He was always talking about how he hated women.’
Caroline shook her head sadly.
‘He does hate women. It’s true that he’s a misogynist. But the reason he hates women is that he feels that they make him love them too much. He senses that his vulnerability to the beauty of women threatens his masculinity and his pride. For him, going to bed with me really is like lying down with a vampire. If anything, Oliver’s a hyper-heterosexual. He is like a flamenco dancer. Have you ever seen flamenco dancing? Oliver snarls and shouts and he arches his back away from me, but he still has to dance with me.’
Caroline’s story continued. By the time she went away with me to Paris (too late to get out of that), she had given herself to my oldest and best friend, but she was still very fond of me, maybe she even sort of loved me a bit in a different sort of way. She did not want to break with me, but she could not tell me the truth. She did not know what she wanted to do, nor could she imagine how things would work out. Oliver, who could not bear to be parted from her for a whole week, had followed us over to Paris and secretly delivered notes to her, begging for a meeting. Things had to be decided one way or another. If she would not agree to meet him, then he would confront me with the facts. Finally she had agreed to meet him in the only place he knew about, the Musée Grevin.
‘The Musée Grevin isn’t just a waxworks museum,’ said Caroline. ‘Who gives a fig about waxworks? I certainly don’t. But inside the Musée, there’s also an amazing room whose walls are all covered in mirrors, so that everything and everybody in it is reflected on and on into infinity. Also there’s a dinky little theatre where conjurors perform all day long. Oliver used to go there and study the form of his French colleagues and rivals. Anyway, that day Oliver and I sat there for quite a while, holding hands and watching the tricks and kissing a bit. We also talked about what to do next, but, as usual we couldn’t decide anything. I felt terribly guilty. I’m sorry we deceived you, but the thing was that I wasn’t sure at that point whether I was going to leave you or what I was going to do. I still did love you then, but it seemed to me that you didn’t want me so badly as Oliver did. I wish you had been a bit more forceful – as he was. I don’t know. I was just confused.’
‘Then, when we returned to England I still didn’t know what to do. You were very demanding. Also you were becoming a bit strange – I’m not sure you realised how strange you were becoming. And Oliver warned me that you were studying hypnotism, apparently in the hope of turning me into some sort of mesmerised sex slave.’ She paused. ‘Please don’t blame Oliver for what happened. He was feeling terribly guilty about stealing me from you, but I told him I wasn’t ‘your woman’. All the same, I was frightened what you’d do to him or to yourself if you ever found out. In the end, Oliver, who was suffering terribly from the uncertainty, thought it would be best if he went abroad and we tried to see if we could live apart from one another for a bit. Maybe we would even be able to forget one another … Of course, Oliver didn’t give a hoot about the Spaniards or the Popular Front. He’s never been political, but he sort of thought it would be a good thing to do, particularly for a writer. All the writers were going to Spain that year. But I think that part of Oliver was sort of hoping to get killed in Spain.’
She fell silent and sat scanning the park in the gathering gloom, doubtless hoping to find her husband and her son in its shadows. The fairy lights, which trailed over the Pavilion and the nearby trees, had been switched on and a loud speaker relayed big band music from the Light Programme. From time to time couples would rise from the Pavilion’s tables and, heavily muffled in scarves and overcoats, they danced to the music.
At last Caroline felt able to resume her narrative.
‘It was only a month later that I discovered I was pregnant. In the meantime I had been seeing a lot of Clive and the other Putney Thespians. Clive didn’t know anything about Oliver or the baby. You were always moody and sulky at that time, but Clive made me laugh and kept me sane. He certainly knew how to treat a lady. A perfect gentleman, Clive. How is he by the way?’
‘I’m afraid he has taken strong exception to the book and is refusing to see me ever again.’
‘Oh dear. Poor Clive. Anyway I was going to tell him and you about everything and ask one of you for help. I really had no other idea about what to do next. In the end, I decided not to tell Clive. He was so chivalrous that he would probably have insisted on marrying me and rearing another man’s child. So it was going to be you. That evening when I came round to Cuba Street (that was a lovely house by the way – I’m sorry it’s gone) I was going to tell you everything, but you were in an exceptionally strange mood that evening and you’d been drinking rather a lot. I could smell it, not just on your breath, but on your clothes as well. And I simply couldn’t stand it and I walked out and ran away from you as fast as I could.
‘I took a taxi most of the way to Putney. It was a long ride and by the time I reached home I had made my mind up. I was going to Spain to look for Oliver. Stealthily I packed a case and left a note for Mummy and Daddy telling them not to worry (though of course they did frightfully) and I crept out of the house. When morning came I took my savings out of the Post Office …’
Caroline continued describing her adventures as she crossed France and Spain, but I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the details of what she was saying, for the beauty of her mouth muffled the words that came out of it. I was thinking mad things like; she is beautiful. A Piero della Francesca painting is beautiful. But I don’t want to go to bed with a Piero della Francesca painting. Whereas I do want to go to bed with Caroline. Why?
Caroline described her train journey through France, her meeting with a pair of deserters from the French army who’d befriended her, the smuggler’s trail across the Pyrenees, the rough bus journey to Madrid and the hopeless days spent trailing from the headquarters of one anarchist organisation to another. (‘It’s funny. You wouldn’t have thought that anarchists had organisations. But they do. Lots of them!’). Meanwhile the city was repeatedly attacked by German and Nationalist bombers. Eventually Caroline had tracked Oliver down in a military hospital outside Madrid. He had got dysentery and nearly died from it, but, by the time she found him, he was recovering. He was just about strong enough to think about resuming work on The Vampire of Surrealism, while he recuperated. Although Caroline had no experience of nursi
ng, the times were such that she got taken on as a kind of nurse-cum-cleaner-cum-cook.
By the time Oliver was recovered, the Spanish government, for some reason or other, had agreed to repatriate all foreigners in the international brigades. But Oliver and Caroline, plus a couple of German anarchists also from Oliver’s platoon decided that they did not want to go back to their own countries. Instead they went to Barcelona and there they boarded a cargo ship bound for Mexico.
As Caroline continued to talk about her adventures in the Americas, a terrible sadness came over me. For most of my adult life I have thought of my story as being the story of Caroline and me and my love for her, but, as I listened to her, it was absolutely clear that she thought of her life as having been the story of Oliver and her and their love for each other. I am only a secondary character in her story, a kind of spear-carrier, whose chief function has been to introduce her to the real hero of her story. She will always be grateful to me for that. I thought of the great story as taking place in London, Paris and Munich, but these places were only settings for the subplot. The real story took happened in Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, New York and Toronto.
Ozymandias was born in a sleeper-car en route for Buenos Aires. Oliver found reasonably well-paid employment as a conjuror working in the entertainment palaces and smart night clubs of Latin America. When it was possible and when Caroline could find a nurse for the child, she would appear with Oliver on stage.
‘I used to wear spangly leotards and a crown of ostrich feathers. I’ve kept my figure,’ she said complacently. ‘I had to.’
Then a characteristic moue.
‘Well, as work goes, it certainly beats typing.’
Later they moved to the United States and she tried to fulfil one of the dreams of her girlhood, by setting up as a dress designer, but without much success. Oliver was still writing stuff that was still getting published, but not for real money. It was fortunate that he was in such demand as a conjuror.
