At the very end of August, on my last Friday at the National, I took all my savings from the Lloyds Bank in Great Ormond Street and closed the account. There was time enough during my lunch hour to visit the Barclays with a foreign currency counter on Southampton Row and change a portion for the week ahead. The Dutch money was brightly coloured, as if by a De Stijl designer, with bold angular shapes and portraits of famous Dutchmen like the poet Vondel, or Spinoza the philosopher. It had a crispy feel and a cheerful look—as if it wasn’t really money at all.
Leaving the hospital meant giving up my cupboard in Finsbury Park. You had moved into a home for juveniles in Paddington. Reluctantly, though doubtless with your own hopes in mind, you were letting me, your practically ex-boyfriend, spend my last few nights there before leaving. It might have seemed I was simply using you, but here at last, and maybe not too late, was a flat big enough for the both of us to fit in.
From your kitchen window I could see the flyovers, underpasses, and skyscrapers stamped with words. The early sun cast strong, sharp shadows across the area’s concrete pillars and frontages. Traffic on the Westway was at a standstill; silver-grey Metropolitan Line trains were clattering on; an Intercity express was heading out west; a barge moved away from its moorings beside the gardens in the Little Venice Basin. Heaped in the corner of your living room were my winter clothes, a pile of books, boxes of paints, filled sketchpads, and two files of assorted art history notes.
You hadn’t been at the place long enough to make up your mind about the new job yet, though the way you’d been greeted on arriving, you told me—well, it was hardly promising.
‘We’re so glad you’re joining us,’ the director announced as you stepped through the blue street doors.‘The previous girl ran away. I expect you’ll be of immense value to our little team, though. Poor Sharon, she had a very tough time of it, but I’m sure you’ll cope. We had to let her go. Never mind, never mind.’
Your flat was on the fifth floor. The senior social worker, Danny, had rooms on the same level as the children, but he was usually sleeping somewhere else for amorous reasons of his own. The inmates, mostly teenage boys, were from broken homes in estates across the Edgware Road. The aim of the institution was to help the younger children get some schooling, and the older find work and a place to rent.
‘What’ll you do when you grow up?’ the director asked a boy called Justin one day.
‘A bank,’ said the lad, laughing into his face.
It was no joke. At that very moment, over the insistently lifting beat of a Bob Marley record, banging noises came up from the children’s living quarters. The kids were obviously hurling things around the room. You had advised your maybe still boyfriend just to ignore them. But that was easier said than done. As the morning wore on, those crashes and rumblings continued unabated from the floor below.
‘Best not over-react,’ you said, and tried to illustrate how not to do so.
A little while later, and as if to prove your point, you decided to slip out a moment to your new bank in Westbourne Grove. Not wanting to be left alone with the kids, I volunteered to keep you company. Once beyond the Settlement’s doors, we turned left down Warwick Crescent and walked briskly along beside the Regent’s Canal in the direction of its black iron bridge. The grass in Rembrandt Gardens was all but shrivelled away, and had been kicked through on the traffic islands to the grey dust beneath. That summer, every day’s weather exactly like the last, it had been easy to lose track of time, to assume that August would go on forever, that September could never come. Barely any clouds crossed the sky above to variegate the yellow grass or grey pavements with shadows. We crossed the iron bridge and went on past a French restaurant, the Warwick Castle pub, and one of your favourite antique shops. In its window hung a Persian carpet and, like make-believe homemakers, we paused a moment to admire it once more. When we got to Warwick Avenue’s tree-lined dual carriageway, you led me round to the left and down towards the Tube.
‘Be careful,’ you were saying, as we passed by the ramshackle newsagent’s stand, its shutters down—as if drained of the meanings which issued from it day after day, attaching themselves for a moment to those surroundings, a capital city on the cusp of earliest autumn.
‘Careful of what?’
We were waiting at the zebra crossing.
‘She’s toying with you, you know.’
‘Well, I don’t know … is she?’
‘Just be careful you don’t come running back after this little fling of yours asking me to pretend that nothing has happened,’ you said. ‘You might very well find I’m not there any more.’
Oh if only I’d taken you at your word. You should never have agreed to meet me in Brussels. Experimenting too, I must have thought that the rules had been changed for everyone, or, if not, that they should have been. But perhaps every generation believes it can get away with anything, as if the rules of previous ones somehow no longer applied. That summer it had really got far, far too hot, though Italy I knew would be hotter. So it was a relief to be out of the sun and inside the bank. Up at the heavy wooden counter, you found your blue passport in the shoulder bag and presented it to the cashier.
‘I’d like to change ten pounds into Italian money, and to have forty pounds of travellers’ cheques, please.’
The teller was a well-dressed, neatly made-up woman wearing a badge. Her name was Mrs. Joy Worthy. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, and there was a mole on the side of her chin with a single fine hair sprouting from it.
She was handing you a rectangular booklet under the glass screen. Up above her on the wall the day’s date was shown on a rotating display: Thursday 4 September 1975.
‘Have you ever used travellers’ cheques before?’ she inquired.
You hadn’t. Now she was asking you to sign them.
‘You’ll have to countersign them in the presence of the cashier when you change them, and don’t forget to make a note of all the cheques you cash. If they’re lost or stolen, you must telephone this number in London immediately.’ She pointed at the slip of paper showing their numbers and a list of contact addresses.
Then you wrote a small cheque to ‘Self’. You folded the Lire and traveller’s cheques into one compartment of your purse. The five pounds for the next five days were squeezed into your jeans’ back pocket.
There was a portable fan set up behind the bank tellers’ counter. It made a faint whirring sound. Even so, the cashier could be heard complaining about the weather as we stepped out into the late summer light and unremitting heat.
Hurrying back across the iron-bridge, you were glancing over at that great white house, the children’s home, which commanded its far corner of the Paddington Basin. The building containing the private welfare centre had begun the century as a hostel for music students—one of them Katherine Mansfield, you told me. This patch of London was also George Dixon’s beat in The Blue Lamp. The night before that old black and white film had been on the TV, and we’d sat seeing parts of the world outside your window bisected by Flying Squad cars. Their alarm bells rang out as they chased a youthful, delinquent Dirk Bogarde with his handgun through pieces of an urban scene barely still surviving between new developments all around.
That day, half a dozen red and green barges were moored in the basin. Pot plants along the cabin roofs were sagging in the sunlight. White façades of grander terraces gleamed beyond the shimmering water and the curving wall to the bridge. The weeping willows on their tiny island trembled in the currents of warm air. Another barge was chugging steadily past it, slipping under the bridges on towards Camden Lock. I too was gazing around as we re-crossed the little iron bridge, looking out past the white house by the water, another fast train leaving from Paddington, on the elevated flyover a car heading eastward … when suddenly a loud splash came echoing from that part of the Regent’s Canal.
Clutching the shopping bag under your arm, you set off at a run towards Belle View House, your eyes lifted to the fourth floor windows. A coffee table and wooden chair could be seen being shouldered from the children’s living quarters. The institutional sticks appeared to drift lazily down through the air, before splashing brightly into the glistening water below. Exasperated, and seemingly helpless in the face of it, you were hurrying past the moored barges as fast as you possibly could to put a stop to what was going on. For now your wayward charges were defenestrating their furniture, and you’d been left alone in charge.
You stepped in through the front door and began running up the five flights of stairs. More slowly, in two minds about whether to continue up to the flat or satisfy my curiosity, I was following close behind you. Alice might well have been right about me being your vicarious culture, but here was some more of my vicarious life. You had dropped your shoulder bag at the children’s door, assumed what must have felt like an air of authority, and stepped directly into the communal living room.
There was Edwin confronting you, with his Elvis Presley haircut, a chair arm doubling as his customized guitar.
‘You can do anything …’ he crooned, his spindly legs and small hips waggling. It was a good imitation, showing parody for parody, farce as farce.
The chair arm had been torn from a piece of furniture that Justin was hurling through the window at that very moment. He was leaning out, looking down at it and giggling as the chair plummeted into the canal.
‘Stop that!’ you shouted.
‘Piss off, girlie,’ said Sylvester in a stage whisper, too close to your ear, and, as if it were addressed to me standing in the doorway, ‘You know what I do to whitey cunts.’
Edwin, copying the older ones, had picked up a metal waste paper basket and was lobbing it after the armchair. Althea, an anorexic, and her friend, the spotty anaemic Tessa, were tearing lurid curtains from the windows, bringing the rails down with them.
‘We could just set these on fire!’ the girls sang and danced around the room. ‘We could just set these on fire!’
‘Get on with it then,’ you were shouting at the lot of them, ‘and chuck the telly in while you’re at it.’
You were trying the paradoxical injunctions, knowing they would never chuck the TV out. Beyond the partly eaten crisps stolen from the storeroom, scattered across the floor, and then ground into the carpet, there it would remain; surrounded by wallpaper hanging in strips, half torn from the scribbled-on walls, bits of it charred or smeared, alone there, in a corner of the devastated room, there’d be the television, the sole remaining item of their furniture.
Then, just as unexpectedly, you turned on your heels and, with a look of anxious responsibility, strode back towards me and the door. Mustering all your composure, you grabbed your shoulder bag as you went by, hissing ‘Upstairs!’ into my ear.
‘Piss off, girlie, like the rest of them!’ Sylvester was leering.
You locked the flat’s front door behind us, dashed to the phone and called Roger, a fellow worker, at his home number. He was just going out.
‘What do I do? They’re throwing all the furniture into the canal.’
You listened for a moment.
‘Should I try to stop them? … Well then, what about calling the police? … Can you come in, Roger? … Sure, fine, good idea … but what do I do now?’
‘All right then, yes, see you tomorrow,’ you were saying, slamming down the phone and gasping, ‘Bastard.’
‘So what did he say?’
‘He said I should learn to cope on my own. He said it was character building. Then he had the nerve to admit he couldn’t come and help because—you won’t believe this—he has to be there for the opening of Captain Psycho’s cabaret at the King’s Head. The sod’s their agent. And did I want to ask you if you’d like to make up a threesome before the show closes?’
Rolling my eyes towards the ceiling, I attempted what was meant to be an expression of pained and sympathetic disbelief.
Early next morning, after trying to kiss your forehead in the dark and missing, I slipped from the flat as quietly as possible, hurried down the flights of stairs and past the inmates’ living quarters. Their door was standing ajar, the room empty of furniture except for the one large television set in its corner. On the floor below were the Belle Vue Trust offices, then the classrooms of its Adult Literacy Scheme. Down two more staircases, and it was simply a matter of slipping the catch on the heavy blue front doors to be out into Warwick Crescent’s bright, deserted pavements. London was still sleeping, the Friday morning silence intensified by a distant car changing gear, accelerating away, and then nothing but the last of the birds’ morning chorus. Underneath the Westway’s flyover towards Royal Oak, the earth was a powdery grey.
I bought a ticket for Liverpool Street, descended to the empty platform and, sitting down on one of its benches, dropped the army surplus rucksack onto its grimy floor. Thick moss and grass were growing out of cracks in the opposite cutting’s concreted walls. Alice would be arriving in Amsterdam the following day. While you were waking and readying yourself for the second twenty-four hours of your shift, my ferry would be steaming out past Harwich’s piers, heading for the Hook of Holland.
Could I imagine living in the Netherlands? It was certainly the country whose landscapes were among my favourite haunts in galleries. What about stopping overnight in Rotterdam with its forests of masts and derricks, the ferries moored right on the doorsteps of houses? There was the Boymans Museum to revisit. But then there’d be the risk of missing my rendezvous. At last a faint movement in the lines began, a humming which signaled the arrival of a train. The silvery Underground carriages slowed to a halt. A purple line map appeared above an entrance opposite. The doors slid open before me with a thud.