Notting Hill has a raffish elegance. Bankers have long ago caused property prices to rise way beyond the means of the vast majority. Once it was run down, but now the gleaming stucco houses advertise wealth and entitlement. They are encased in so many coats of white paint that they look like huge chunks carved from an iceberg. I was lucky – I bought here cheaply more than twenty-five years ago. Once again property prices are in the news. London is obsessed with property prices. Are they too high? Is the bubble going to burst? An apartment was sold recently for £140 million. Earlier inhabitants think that Notting Hill has been ruined.
Winter has come. I am off to Cape Town where I was born. Every year as the northern winter arrives, I leave for my house on the sea. It takes ten minutes to walk from my front door to the Underground, past the old Coronet Cinema, where I spent hours out of the cold when I first came to London. Down here, on the Central Line, deep under London, maverick blasts of warm air reach us. I look at my fellow travellers and make a sort of assessment, as though I am mandated to make these judgements: are there more Chinese than usual? Are there many more Eastern Europeans? Are those men with the sticky-up haircuts hedge-fund boys heading for the City? Are these men in cheap tracksuits asylum seekers? Is this worried man, leafing backwards and forwards in a dog-eared book, perhaps looking desperately for inspiration, a novelist? I see no theme today: there is just resignation in dulled eyes. The passengers are subdued: depression hangs over them as if they were Iceland, to misquote. Beneath the skin around their noses and on their eyelids, I see a chafed redness emerging determinedly. It is like a pentimento, the earlier pigments fading, to expose what is underneath. Today the summer pigment is fading, to reveal the faces of winter.
A woman of about forty-five years old is holding a compact and using a brush on her eyelids. She has to peer out of one eye as she works on the other; she cocks her head and moistens her mouth; unsatisfied, she touches up her lashes with a second, stronger, application of eyeshadow. Time and again she looks at herself in the mirror, improving her work. Now she is applying some glittery material, perhaps mascara, to her brown smoky eyelids with a brush. I feel for her; she seems to be very anxious, as if she is going for a job interview. Or she may be trying to look young and alluring. In its small scale, it contains a tragedy. My ex-wife – how welcome the ‘ex’ is – would have said I was patronising, but I know that women have a more difficult path through life than men. Childbirth is profoundly important for women and it endows them with arcane knowledge, not accessible to men.
I admire the English and I believe I almost understand them. I have a few paintings, among them an Ivon Hitchens and a Paul Nash. I like to think that I haven’t bought them for any reason other than because they speak to me of their Englishness. I have tried to surround myself with beauty, and sometimes I think that it is the only important thing that money has given me.
In South Africa my family had two numinous paintings by the Afrikaner painter, Hendrik Pierneef, which celebrated the Boers and their remote farms. These paintings contained a message for the Afrikaners of divine blessing in their search for a new Eden among the heathens. My father said the paintings were ‘of their time’. In those days quite a lot of things were excused by this phrase.
The economy has improved, but people complain about the cost of living. When I arrived in London in 1982 I had nothing. Now I am fairly wealthy; I have the house in Notting Hill, a farmhouse in the New Forest, where I am the friend of New Forest ponies, deer and many types of bird; I know where to find the secret hiding places of chanterelles and parasol mushrooms. Also, I have the beach house a few miles south of Cape Town, a house that is inspired by Martha’s Vineyard: it is pale blue and white with a broad, bleached deck overlooking the sea and a garden that tumbles down the hill.
I am going to pick up the Mercedes, which has been serviced, and then I will drive down to the New Forest to lock up for the winter before I fly to Cape Town where we will meet Lucinda, my daughter. Nellie, my lover, is coming too, possibly with her son, Bertil.
I emerge from the Underground at Marble Arch and I walk down Park Lane. According to the London Mail this is now the bridgehead for Romanian gypsies whose presence has been exercising the editor. According to her, Hyde Park will soon be a gypsy encampment, with barefoot urchins gathering unspeakable bits of meat from bins outside restaurants, to be boiled for hours on fires fuelled by chopping down the ancient oaks of Hyde Park at night – the oak, England’s symbolic tree, for God’s sake. Bulldogs, oak trees, bobbies, all on the way out as symbols, along with standard English. At the moment I can count just four people who could be Romanians, no doubt the advance party, the pathfinders, for the masses to come.
It is true of all great cities that they have many faces. Most of the time I love London immoderately, but when the afternoons darken and close, I feel a claustrophobic depression descending on me. Today the sky is clear and still, so still that Hyde Park is frozen in a landscape painting – a day, an hour, a moment preserved. The grasslands are coated in frost. I can see horses cantering reluctantly on the bridleway. I know horses. Livery horses move wearily because they are bored with the endless circuits; they live without the possibility of novelty. The English feel they have a special bond with horses; more upper-class women are killed falling off a horse than in any other causes, including road crashes and drug abuse. I love horses for their decency.
The Christmas lights on the trees and on the grand buildings of Park Lane are struggling to be seen, so clear and low and adamantine is the afternoon light. Anything is possible today, I think.
I speak to Nellie from the car. She is already there, busy in the house. She asks me if I am happy. She always asks me this question and it always warms me. There is ease and tranquillity between us, something I have not experienced before. I say yes, thanks to you, I am happy, even ecstatic, although at the moment my happiness has a persistent undertow of anxiety: my daughter has been discharged from rehab in California and is coming to Cape Town to stay with us. Her drug-taking, I am convinced, was a reaction to my break-up with my wife. Maybe all broken marriages cause cracks to open in the self-esteem, and even in the souls, of children. The pain my ex-wife and I caused our daughter will be on my conscience until the day I die.
Lucinda sided with me when Georgina and I separated. Together she and I weathered the onslaught of Georgina’s lawyers. My wealth, Georgina will tell anyone who is prepared to listen – and some who are not – is her wealth. It is not true. Her story goes on to relate that, with the help of crooked lawyers, I was able to prise open the family vaults. The truth is that I knew that her family had a fancy tax-avoidance scheme in the Isle of Man and I kept this to myself until I had to play my trump card.
Georgina raged about how I had spent her money; she had forgotten that it was she who bought large and decrepit houses in Notting Hill and turned them into lavish boutique hotels which failed and she forgot that it was she who set up doomed businesses which were intended to help the coffee growers of Nicaragua or to finance remote Indian communities in making saris or to support a cooperative in Venezuela which empowered women or to bring fresh water to impoverished villages in Zimbabwe – and many other causes.
She loved her philanthropic work because it allowed her to mix with pop stars and models and designers and it allowed her to ignore the administration of the finances as she engaged in this high-altitude life. She saw no irony in rubbing up against rich pop stars, who are the visionaries of our era. At the same time she never cared for writers, unless they were huge best-sellers, as if sales were the only validation of a writer. She lives in a visual world.
All her enterprises ended in theft, corruption and lawsuits. Many millions of her father’s legacy were lost. I tried to warn her and she interpreted these warnings as jealousy or a desire to control her. She said that men like me were incapable of giving women respect and space. She grew very still when I gave her advice, lifting her head and looking away as though she was hoping to see something more congenial and pleasant to rest her gaze on. I grew to loathe her, and this hatred affected Lucinda.
One day Georgina declared that she was in love with a friend of my best man, and she demanded a divorce. I didn’t contest it; as a matter of fact I was delighted. The judge was something of a Leveller; he didn’t warm to Georgina’s family and its sense of entitlement, nor to the blustering and expensive QC who was drafted in at the last minute to oppose the settlement. A small, almost visible, cloud of self-esteem circled him, like one of those planets that are loosely wrapped in vapour and trailed by clouds of red dust. Or perhaps like an egg poaching in a little whirlpool of attendant egg white. But when I mentioned the family’s Isle of Man scheme, the QC quickly advised a settlement. Georgina described it to her friends as blackmail and they were quick to pass her opinion on to me. This all happened five years ago.
As the result of this warfare, Lucinda had started to take drugs at her school and she quickly descended into drug hell. It happened very quickly, too quickly for me to understand or to recognise. Later she told me that drugs were available everywhere; in London, she said, if you were on heroin you were able to buy the stuff absolutely anywhere and you could find a dealer even in the smallest rural village. As a user you are able to spot dealers without difficulty; she said that, like the proximity of rats in London, you are never more than a few yards from a dealer. The dealers will unerringly recognise the addicts.
Her problems have tormented me, because I know that Georgina and I were blinded by a bitterness that ran wildly out of control and destroyed our beloved child. Incongruously, I think of the African savannah when a sudden lightning strike ignites the dry grass. I seem to have acquired my own, African, set of metaphors. In some inexplicable way I believe that the African landscape exists deep within me, imprinted indelibly many years ago. My reveries often involve Africa. For instance, I remember my Tannie Marie’s farm and the huge raindrops falling on the tin roof and I remember the hail which followed, as big as golf balls, bouncing on the farm road and creating an arctic landscape which soon melted; I remember the forlorn bleating of the sheep lined up to be dunked after shearing in a plunge dip full of cloudy, pungent chemicals. And I remember vividly the black people who worked on the farm and who gave me mealie porridge from their cast-iron pots. I recalled how they rolled the porridge into a fat cigar shape and handed it to me with a delicately cupped hand; the skin of the palms of their hands was lined, strangely pale, and their eyes often had a yellow cast. Sometimes they gave me the porridge soaked in fermented milk, amasi, which Tannie Marie called maas. I think there must surely be some connection. I remember when Nestlé promoted an African drink on Springbok Radio: Introducing new Nestlé Make-it-Yourself Maas. Made from real milk to give you all the taste of traditional creamy home-made maas. We pronounced ‘Nestlé’ as ‘Nessles’.
The black people, who had so little, were invariably kind to me; they were a little curious and perhaps a little concerned about a small white boy wandering around this derelict place.
All these things, all these whispered messages, are becoming more important to me, as though I am hearing a lost language or a distantly remembered tune.