‘No, Rich, it probably isn’t. It’s just something that struck me. So sorry to have an opinion; I’ll try to keep them to myself in future.’
‘Em, you know I didn’t mean that. I meant that there are some very big issues, Catholicism, the end of the Plantagenets, the Protestant future . . . all the things that Shakespeare thought about. I just think these are more important. Sorry.’
‘Shakespeare created the English language,’ she said.
‘I agree.’
And I do, in a way.
2
I was named
Richard because my father loved Richard I of England, the Lionheart. But I am usually called Richie. My father’s surname – and mine – is Cathar, which he adopted when he was at Oxford in 1963 and often under the influence of drugs. Our family name was previously Carter, way too mundane for my father.
There is a small but distinct group of men that I recognise at a distance, and try to avoid. My father was one of them. They have a kind of frayed-at-the-edges charm and a slightly distracted cheerfulness, as though they are attuned to amusing private frequencies. Their hair is long, even if decimated by hereditary patterns of baldness; their clothes are a little threadbare and ill-matched, so that a Tibetan
shari
can be worn with an old pinstriped suit; or perhaps a thick pair of corduroys, of a type found only in a few streets near the traditional London clubs, will be paired confidently with a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.
This morning, on the first leg of a relatively pointless journey on the No. 30 bus and the Underground to buy some sausages, I saw a woman – a grandmother, but still a ditsy blonde – enter my carriage pushing a pram. She had that unmotivated optimism of my father’s generation. She was wearing a short ostrich cape and a yak-wool scarf. The cape had once been – I guessed – an electrifying green, but now, like the Statue of Liberty, it was verdigris. As the air of the train eddied, disturbed by the rushing anxious progress, it caused the cape to spring into a lively but syncopated dance: scores of antique ostrich feathers fluttered onto the floor and into the pram. I could not see the baby within; perhaps it was being smothered by the errant ostrich feathers or maybe it was soothed by their snowfall touch. I wanted to speak to this woman who, I could now see as she bent over the baby, was wearing a Navajo silver belt low on her jeans. The silver discs on the belt bore important Native American messages. I got a glimpse of a puckered, tripe-textured stomach when her cheesecloth shirt opened for a moment. I wanted to know where she was going with her grandchild. Also I wanted to ask her if she knew that the cape was moulting: if she were going as far as Dollis Hill or Clapham Junction, it would be bald on arrival. She smiled at me as she saw me looking her way: women with babies imagine you are interested in their charges. Her teeth were not good, worn down to stubs, but her smile was complicit. She was old enough to be my mother, but she recognised something in me. She was, I thought, like my father, one of those not securely moored to reality. It is his birthday today, and he has been dead for ten years.
Now, back from my sausage outing, I am throwing things onto a bonfire. A clear-out is long overdue. The accumulated stuff contains an implicit reproach. I am multi-tasking, getting rid of rubbish and intending to use the fire to barbecue my sausages when it has subsided. At the moment it is alarmingly excitable. The cleansing fire of purgatory, my father wrote, terrified people in the Middle Ages. He said that purgatory was designed to finish off the last, few, lingering sins – the sort of thing chefs do to a soufflé or a crème brûlée with a little blow torch: a light scorching before presentation. In 1999 Pope John Paul II pronounced:
Purgatory does not indicate a place but a condition of existence
. As if anyone were listening. What is it with these religious figures that they make absurd statements about sainthood and gay marriage and purgatory and the covering of women? Do they not realise that religion is purely cultural, an explanation and a comfort dating from a world before antibiotics, hospital births and logical positivism?
I am aware that in my loneliness my mind is unruly. It seems to be flying blindly about like a swallow trapped in a building, crashing into windows, unable to make a plan of any sort.
In the toxic, dark, cat-fouled, medieval strip of dank dead clay – once a lawn, still overhung by a few leggy leftover shrubs – the bonfire is casting interesting light and shadow on the derelict Welsh chapel which forms the end of the garden so that it looks incandescent, as though the Holy Fire from the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem has appeared here for a moment. The Orthodox Patriarch, who is the impresario of the Holy Fire’s appearances, is on record as saying that he has never had his beard singed – not once – as the Holy Fire whizzed about the church on its annual outing. This is the sort of convincing detail you want if you are going to believe in a miracle. Although, like many miracles, this one seems a little pointless – fire of unknown origin zigzagging about for a few moments from one Romanesque pillar to another without toasting the Patriarch. What does this mean?
The Welsh chapel, which once gave succour to the immigrant Welsh men and women, mostly occupied in the milk trade, is alive again. Its walls are host to wild dancing as the garden furniture catches fire. The few remaining panes of the chapel’s leaded windows are winking lubriciously. The Welsh dairies closed well within living memory. Fortunately, it happened before progressive people discovered lactose intolerance, which joined gluten, caffeine and cos lettuce intolerance as conditions to be wary of. People speak of their afflictions as if they convey some distinction on them. Something else these Welsh dairy folk did not have to suffer was the slogan
Breast is best
. The incoming classes in this part of East London have adopted the
Madonna Lactans
as their patron saint. Formula milk stunts intellectual growth.
I am aware that irrationality is on the march – I am, after all, my father’s son. I know it when I see it.
I am studying the bonfire. The garden furniture went well at first – it was surprising how quickly the patterned seats and the backrests were consumed – the effect was almost explosive – but now the frames are glowing ominously, like something radioactive, and there is a sharp, choking chemical aroma in the air. I throw on a roll of damp carpet that has surreptitiously become wet in the former coalhole. It gives off a dense, dark smoke, like a tanker on fire at sea. I have to acknowledge that I am cursed with a kind of incompetence in regard to the straightforward and practical tasks of life. For instance, when I tried recently to change a tyre on the Honda inherited from my father, the jack inexplicably collapsed, bending the drive axle. I had to pay someone to scrap it. My cooking has often gone wrong: small fires have broken out, which included a rogue blaze in the cooker hood that could easily have rushed through the building; a pan has been welded to a cooker, any number of fishes and meats have been incinerated, and I once hooked my own nose when fly-fishing on the Dee. I was using a dry fly, a Tups Indispensable.
Emily was becoming exasperated: my charming disorganisation had begun to annoy her. She was increasingly inclined to ask questions with a rhetorical thrust: ‘Why are your underpants on the floor of the sitting room?’ The only possible answer was that I had dropped them there in the course of my morning progress from the thin shower, but of course no marks were awarded for honesty. She has a literary bent (2:1 in comparative literature, Reading University) and described me as becoming more and more like Oblomov. When I had read up on Oblomov I said, ‘At least you think I am amiable.’ (If, like me, you don’t really know anything much about Oblomov, I can tell you now that he is the astonishingly lazy but amiable Russian owner of a country mansion in a book by Ivan Goncharov. He fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel.)
‘Actually, I don’t. I think your self-congratulatory idea of yourself as being chilled and charming is passive aggression.’
Now she has gone, like her heroine, Anna Karenina. She said she needed her personal space; she needed time to think. She wanted to express herself, and maybe she would take a creative writing course. But I have heard from one of her friends who has spoken to her at length, and she couldn’t wait to give me the news that she has a new partner in Sheffield. I’ve left messages for Emily, clothed in a cheerful (and bogus) reasonableness, but she hasn’t replied. I have not even hinted that I know of the existence of her partner, but actually I would like to go to the steel city, like Dickens,
roaring, rattling through the purple distance
, to stick a Sheffield steel knife into this partner. He teaches creative writing, not of itself a crime.
How our friends enjoy, in the guise of concern, giving us the little, lethal, details.
My plans to grill some sausages are delayed by the chemical nature of the fire. They are Norman sausages, flavoured with Calvados and apple. I bought them from a French deli near the Institut français in South Kensington to honour my father on his birthday and his hero, Richard the Lionheart, who was Duke of Normandy, as well as King of England. His heart is buried in Rouen Cathedral. The rest of his entrails are in Fontevraud Abbey.
My father was the author of an unpublished (and unfinished) biography,
The True Story of Richard the Lionheart
. The research was mostly intuitive. My father claimed to have discovered – his sources were never made public – that Richard had indeed returned secretly from his time as a hostage after the Third Crusade and met up with Robin Hood, not in Nottingham, but in Barnsdale Forest in Rutland where he was hunting. They became bosom companions. The truth is that after his coronation in 1189, Richard set off for the Holy Land and spent only a few weeks of the next ten years in England. England and much of France were one kingdom then, so Richard would have thought of himself as living in greater England.
My father claimed to have had a piece of luck: rooting in the library of a friend, who was himself an earl living in Leicestershire – Balliol man, pass degree – he found an account of their meeting in a letter written on vellum. The Earl was the manager of a rock band at the time, so he didn’t mind in the least my father taking away the original for authentication. I imagine him saying,
That’s cool, man
. The letter was written in late Norman French. This letter – my father said – contained the details of a secret meeting between Robin Hood, rightful Earl of Huntingdon, and the King, which was to take place in the deep forest. The King promised to stop his awful brother, John, bringing an act of attainder against Robin. If they did meet, I imagine there would have been a little language difficulty, as Richard mostly spoke the
langue d’oc
and Robin would have spoken the East Midland dialect of emerging English. When Richard was back in charge, my father claimed, he pardoned Robin Hood, restored his lands, and often went hunting with him.
Was this not the plot of
Ivanhoe
? I asked him.
He looked at me with compassion. There were secret sources of knowledge, not available to plodders and literalists. If Richard had spent more time in England – more time than the two days of summer required to undermine Nottingham Castle, hang some of the defenders, and pay a visit to Sherwood Forest – who knows? – they might indeed have grown close. My father had no evidence, but he trusted his intuition. People who take drugs often do. To them much is revealed through close, leisurely self-examination. Serious scholars, of the non-intuitive sort, have hunted through the records of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Leicestershire: the first mentions of a Robin Hood, Hod, or Robert Hoode appear over fifty years later.
My father cited a stone on a grave at Kirklees Priory in Yorkshire. It bore this inscription:
Hear undernead dis laitl stean
Lais Robert Earl of Huntingdun
Near arcir der as hie sa geud
An pipl kauld im Robin Heud
Sic utlaws as he an is men
Vil england nivr si agen.
—
Obit 24 Kal Dekembris 1247
Here underneath this little stone
Lies Robert Earl of Huntingdon
No archer as he was so good
And people called him Robin Hood
Such outlaws as he and his men
Will England never see again.
With his scepticism about rational explanations, my father would inevitably have believed that his pal was a descendant of Robin Hood. But the revived title was only resurrected in the sixteenth century, so his lost parchment was most likely a forgery.
The parcel containing the original sheet of vellum, borrowed from his aristocratic chum’s library, was unfortunately lost in Orly Airport when my father went into a cubicle to light a joint and comb his hair, which he modelled on Jim Morrison’s. He was in transit to Ibiza. When he realised he had left the parcel in the
lavabos
, it was gone and never found. He raged at the border police for their incompetence. Quite quickly they took him into a small room and roughed him up a little because he had called them pigs and had Jim Morrison’s dissident hair. But, he said, he was only trying to explain that a precious document written on vellum – calf skin – had been lost. He had not called the police
cochons
. When he told me this story he seemed quite proud of the incident: ‘It was 1968,’ he said. ‘It was a crazy time,’ as if that explained everything. One thing he never explained was why he had left Oxford so abruptly during his second year in Hilary Term, 1963.