For the Time Being (2 page)

Despite the setback, things steadily improved. After a week, I was returned to my room and stared at the Post Office Tower. I was taken off the sloppy diet and allowed to eat a bit of toast, which I did nervously but successfully. Once back on proper food, I began to perk up. I had seen my face while trying to shave and thought I looked like an El Greco saint. I was told to put on weight before I could do any real exercises. So I ate porridge, toast, butter and egg-and-bacon sandwiches, which I made with one hand, very proudly.

The week before Christmas, I was allowed to come back to the
flat, having been passed fit to cope – which was, to say the least, optimistic. Anyway, I was pleased to be rid of the Post Office Tower and the plum tree.

I was frightened of the prospect of the flat, after so long. All was in order, however. A very obliging nurse, who hated Christmas as much as I did, came back with me to see me over the first hurdle. The wheelchair in my sitting-room was not at all comfortable or easy to manoeuvre with one arm, but Brock and Kim had fitted the flat with all kinds of devices: rails for my bed, so I didn't fall out; hand-grabs all over the place; a commode; and just about every other reminder of indignity you can imagine – plus a mobile phone, which, although detestable, has proved useful.

A year or so later, here I still am, unable to do anything for myself. I am nursed day and night, and have to be turned. But there is the television and unlimited reading matter. As of this moment, however, a vague sense of feeling might be returning to my lower limb. We persevere with exercises. Writing is impossible: I can work only through dictation. Therefore, at John Coldstream's suggestion, we have put together this collection of work which has appeared in newspapers during the past two decades.

The first part of the book is a miscellany of articles, essays, obituaries and even a letter or two to the Editor. The second consists almost entirely of reviews commissioned for the Books Pages of the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Sunday Telegraph,
printed here in chronological order. This period of my writing life, as a critic, came about in an unexpected way.

In my sixth volume of autobiography,
A Short Walk from Harrods
(1993), I describe how, in the dark days of early 1988, I was back, miserably, in London after some twenty years in France. Forwood, my manager, was dying of cancer and the nurses had arrived to care for him. One evening a pleasant young man came round to the house for a drink. He was Nicholas Shakespeare, then the literary editor of the
Daily Telegraph,
and he asked if I would consider reviewing some books for him. The suggestion was so surprising, the meeting in the unhappy house so bizarre, that I agreed. Why not? I had to pretend that life would continue; all was really quite
normal; there was no one in the room above fighting for life. I felt a mild glow of hope. I'd manage somehow.

One morning shortly afterwards, a package of books was delivered, with a note: ‘About 750 words? By the 27th?' The result was a review of
Mr Harty's Grand Tour,
which appeared on 2 April 1988 – the first of about fifty notices to be published in the next six years. Nicholas didn't know it at the time, but it was he who chucked a plank across the ravine for me. He moved on, and his successor, John Coldstream, became the handrail.

The articles and reviews collected here constitute a ‘body of work' which has surprised me, if only because of its bulk. In any case, it will have to do – at least for the time being …

DIRK BOGARADE London, 1998

Memory: I scratch about like a hen in chaff. The first thing that I can recall is light: pale, opaque green, white spots drifting. Near my right eye long black shapes curling down and tickling gently.

Years later when I reported this memory to my parents they confirmed it. There had, apparently, been an extraordinary pea-soup fog: it had snowed at the same time. My mother had lifted me up to observe the phenomenon; the black feathers which wreathed her hat irritated my eye and I tried to pull them away. I was about two years old.

I remember lying on my back on the lawn behind the house in St George's Road. It was a brilliant day of high wind and scudding cloud. The tall house reeled away from me as the clouds whipped across the blue sky and I was afraid that it would fall down and crush me.

And later I saw our giant ginger cat – well, giant to me then – nailed alive to the tall wooden fence which separated us from an unfriendly neighbour. I remember my mother weeping: which frightened me far more than the sight of the dying cat, for I had not yet learned to recognize cruelty or death, but I was recognizing pain and distress on a human face for the first time.

It would not be the last.

The house in St George's Road was tall, ugly, built of grey-yellow bricks with a slate roof. It had the great advantage for my father, who was a painter, of a number of high-ceilinged rooms with perfect north light. It also had a long narrow garden with ancient trees.

An Irish woman lived in the basement with two children and cleaned the house from time to time. She had once been a maid to the Chesterfields, who lived in a very grand house not far away called The Lodge.

Sometimes I would see her crouching on a landing with a mop or a brush. There was an almost constant smell of cooking from the basement, and my father said it was Irish stew because that was what the Irish ate.

I suppose that made sense to me: at least I have remembered it.

My father was a prudent man, with little fortune, and he let off most of the rooms in the house to artist friends so that, apart from the prevailing smell of Irish stew, the place reeked of turpentine and linseed oil. The mixed scent of those two is the one which I remember best, and if I smell them anywhere I go, I am instantly at ease, familiar and secure.

One of his lodgers was, in fact, an artists' model who had been left behind, in a rather careless manner, by an artist who had wandered off to Italy to paint. I knew her as Aunt Kitty.

Tiny, vivid, a shock of bright red hair brushed high up from her forehead, brilliant green eyes heavily lined with kohl, she was loving, warm and exceptionally noisy. For some reason, which I can no longer recall, I always seemed to see her carrying a tall glass of Russian tea in a silver holder. I never knew why, or even what it was, then; and I never asked.

She had a small powder puff in a red leather bag which I found interesting, for it looked exactly like a fat little bun with an ivory ring in its middle. If you pulled the ring, out came the powder puff, of softest swan's-down, and the powder never spilled. It smelled warm, sweet and sickly. I liked it. Her room was dark nearly all the time, for she hated daylight, which she said gave her terrible headaches. So the room was lighted here and there with small lamps draped with coloured handkerchiefs; each had a stick of incense burning beside it – the handkerchiefs cast strange and beautiful patterns on the ceiling.

There was a gold-and-black striped divan. Cushions in profusion tumbled all about the floor for one to sit on or lie upon. She had no chairs. I found that exceptionally curious, as I did the polar-bear rug with roaring head, fearful teeth, glassy eyes and a pink plaster tongue, and the tall jars which were stuffed with the feathers from peacocks' tails.

It was the most exciting room in the house. She also had a portable gramophone which stood on a table with a broken leg, which she had supported with a pile of books. She would wind it up after each record, a cigarette hanging from her lips, hoop earrings swinging from her ears, dressed as I only ever remember her dressed: in long, rustling dressing gowns covered with flowers and bluebirds, bound around her waist with a wide tasselled sash. The tassels swung and danced as she moved.

On occasion she was distressed and wept hopelessly. Then my mother had to go down to the scented room and comfort her. Sometimes, too, she was rather strange. Leaning across to caress my cheek, for example, she would quite often miss me and crash to the floor in a heap. I found this worrying at first. However, she usually laughed and dragged herself upright by holding on to the nearest piece of furniture.

She once told me, leaning close to my face, that she had had ‘one over the eight': I didn't know what she meant, and when I asked, my father bit his lower lip, a sign I knew to indicate anger, and said he did not know.

But I was pretty certain that he did.

Her dazzling eyes, the henna'd hair frizzed out about the pale, oval face, the coarse laughter, the tassels and the peacocks' feathers are still, after so many years, before me.

She offered me, in that crammed room, a sense of colour and beauty, and, even, although I was almost unaware at the time, excitement. I was uncomprehending of nearly all that she said, but I did realize that she was offering riches beyond price.

First had come light; after light, scent – originally of turpentine and linseed oil (hardly romantic, one might think); and now I was shown colour and, above all, made aware of texture.

‘Touch it!' she would say. ‘Touch the silk, it's so beautiful. Do you know that a million little worms worked to make this single piece?'

I didn't, of course: but the idea fascinated me. That something so fine, so sheer, so glorious should come from ‘a million little worms' filled me with amazement, and I liked worms from then on.

Sometimes she would go away, and when I asked Mrs O'Connell where she had gone to she would only reply: ‘A-voyagin'.' Which was no help. My parents, when questioned, said that she had gone on her holidays. I had an instant vision of buckets and spades, shrimping nets and long stretches of sand with the tide far out. And, in consequence, knowing that Aunt Kitty would be having a lovely time, I put her from my mind.

When she returned she came bearing amazing gifts. Silver rings for my mother, a basket of brilliant shells of all kinds and shapes for me, French cigarettes for my father who, I knew instinctively, liked them better than he liked Aunt Kitty.

She brought for herself rolls of coloured cloth: silks, voiles, cottons of every hue and design. These she would throw about her room in armfuls, so that they fell and covered the ugly furniture; then, with the cigarette hanging from her lip, she would wind up the gramophone, drape a length of cloth about her body and dance. Barefoot: her nails painted gold.

Mesmerized I would sit and watch the small feet with gold-tipped toes twist and spin among tumbles of brilliant silks and the spilled shells from my palm-leaf basket.

‘Why Do I Love You?

Why Do You Love Mee … ?'

She told me, winding up the gramophone for the second side of the record, that the silks had come across the sands of Araby on the backs of camels, that she had seen monkeys swing among the branches of jacaranda trees, and flights of scarlet birds swoop across opal skies. I had not the least idea what she meant. But somewhere in my struggling mind the awareness was growing, from her words, that far beyond the confines of St George's Road, West End Lane, Hampstead, lay a world of magic and beauty.

Once I heard my father say that one day Aunt Kitty would not return from one of her ‘voyages'.

And one day that is exactly what happened. She never came back again; the Ground Floor Front was locked. I asked where she had gone. My father said possibly into the belly of a crocodile: which distressed me for a whole morning.

Years later I was to discover that no crocodile had taken Aunt Kitty: she had gone off, willingly, with a rich Sultan from the East Indies.

When her room was opened it was exactly as she had left it. She had taken nothing with her, not even the silks. There was the gramophone, the draped lamps, the gold-striped divan, the bearskin and the little red leather powder puff wrapped in letter paper, on which she had printed a message to my mother, begging her to keep it always as a remembrance of her.

Which she did. For many years it lay at the bottom of her jewel case and sometimes I would take it out, with permission, pull the little ivory ring, release the swan's-down puff and the strange, musky scent. Naturally, over the years, the scent grew fainter and fainter until, eventually, there was only a ghostly odour, and the swan's-down puff grew thin, grey and finally moulted. But Aunt Kitty remains in my mind as clear as when she wound up her gramophone for me.

‘We'll have a little dancy, ducky, shall we? Would that be lovely?'

Some time after she left us my sister Elizabeth was born. I was taken off to Scotland by my maternal grandmother Nelson, a friendly, firm, warm, straight-backed woman in black, to keep me ‘out of the way'. I can only remember a new tweed coat with a velvet collar, of which I was inordinately proud, a railway compartment, and sitting with a round, black-lacquered wicker basket, painted with pink roses, which contained my sandwiches.

When I returned to the ugly house in St George's Road an enormous pram with wheels like dustbin lids stood in the front drive, and Mrs O'Connell said that I had a baby sister and that if they were not careful (they apparently being my parents) a cat would sit on the baby's face and smother it. Faithfully I reported this piece of information, and my howling sister was draped in netting.

With another member in the family, discipline was relaxed, and I was left free to wander from studio to studio, squashing tubes of paint, watching the ‘Uncles' (they were all called ‘Uncle', the resident artists who rented my father's rooms) painting their
canvases, and being as tiresome as any child of four could be in a cluttered room full of sights and smells and bottles.

Bottles had a great attraction for me. I wonder why? I can remember, very clearly, taking down a full bottle of Owbridge's Lung Tonic and swallowing its contents. I liked, enormously, the taste of, I suppose, laudanum, or whatever the soothing drug was which it contained.