‘The artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.’ André Gide
Search childhood for those undying harvests of humiliation and faithfully they come scuttling back. In weary tones of classroom despair, the careless arrows are still cast, V. Poor inscribed a thousand times. ‘You wrote a poem,’ a voice calls down the table while teatime sausage-rolls are passed along the rows. Surreptitiously written, surreptitiously delivered to I.G. Sainsbury, more man than boy, editor of the subversive magazine. ‘How did you know?’ I whisper beneath the clatter of feet as we leave the dining hall, and learn that Sainsbury needed something to light his cigarette with.
Employment nurtured more of the same. But when the years begin to pile up, mockery loses its sting, as if it has done with you at last; and matters less, then not at all. What follows now should have been a mortification, yet wasn’t when it happened.
I received a letter from the Arts Council informing me that I had been awarded a literary prize and binding me to secrecy until after the presentation. In due course there was a telephone call from the Arts Council’s public relations department, with details of a few publicity wheezes that might be put in place then too. I explained that I wasn’t good on publicity but agreed to give a reading. This was to be an item in an arts festival which by coincidence would be in full swing in and around London at the same time. The Thames was mentioned when I asked and I thought of Marlow, or Hampton perhaps.
It turned out to be neither. On the evening after the award ceremony my wife and I met a young man from the festival and an attractive lady from the Arts Council in the hall of Durrant’s Hotel, where we all waited for the taxi that was to take us to our rendezvous. ‘And where exactly is that?’ I asked and was told it was the Thames Flood Barrier. Agitated telephone calls were made when our taxi didn’t arrive. When it still didn’t we picked one up on the street.
We crawled through heavy traffic, taking longer about it than our minders had intended. Meditating on which bridge to cross, the driver took the opportunity to enquire if we were certain that the Flood Barrier was where we wanted to go, since at this time of night there mightn’t be much doing out there. We reassured him and he drove patiently on, identifying for us the impressive riverside buildings when at last we reached them. In time we left Southwark behind, and Bermondsey and Deptford. A sign to Greenwich looked promising, but stylish Greenwich wasn’t for us. We’d been on the road for more than an hour when we turned out of the traffic, into docklands that for the most part were pitch-dark.
‘Well, now you’ve got me,’ the taxi-driver confessed, his headlights sweeping over a vast concrete nowhere, roadless and signless. ‘I have a telephone number,’ the young man said.
As he spoke, two figures were suddenly lit up, gazing at our approach. They were schoolgirls, who asked us when we stopped if we were Gilbert and George. We said we weren’t and they despondently wandered off into the dark again.
We drove on, windows down, all of us peering out. ‘That could be a telephone box,’ someone said, and it was. We drew up beside it and watched the young man prodding in his number and then waiting to be answered. We heard a very faint ringing that ceased when he put the receiver down. We passed this on to him when he returned to the taxi and he hammered on the door of what in the glow from the telephone-box appeared to be a shed. Nothing happened, so we all got out except the taxi-driver.
A touch of fog had developed and we made our way cautiously through it, aware of architectural shapes that were not quite buildings, and of silence and the rawness of the air. As we turned to go back to the taxi, shadows moved in the far distance and, while we watched, three tall men materialized. They were carrying soundboxes and other electrical equipment; behind them there was a woman with two plates of sandwiches. Someone had seen a car driving about, she said.
We followed them and the taxi followed us. The doors of a building that had eluded us before were unlocked, lights came on and we went in. Chairs were arranged in rows but no one was sitting on them. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ the taxi-driver wanted to know, keen for more adventure. He was surprised when I said I was going to read a story but, obliging as ever, he sat down in the front row with some of the sandwiches. Then a boy and his father joined him. Reading it, I made the story rather shorter than it was.
As we passed the schoolgirls on our way back to central London we offered them a lift but they were suspicious and refused. Gilbert and George hadn’t felt like performing artistically in a waterworks was what they reckoned, and said with some feeling that they didn’t blame them.
The taxi-driver drew up in Wigmore Street, where the young man visited a hole-in-the-wall before attempting to settle the taxi bill. ‘Come in and have a drink,’ I invited him and the Arts Council lady when we reached Durrant’s Hotel. I invited the taxi-driver too because he’d been so nice, but he said he’d better not. I signed the story I’d read and gave it to him instead.
Over drinks, I dismissed what signs there were that apologies might be in order. Blame does not belong when the circumstances are flawed and in the warm, snug bar it seemed neither here nor there that twenty-four hours hadn’t been time enough to spread the word of a forthcoming event; neither here nor there that the docklands at night were perhaps not quite the place for Gilbert and George’s subtleties. As for us, our evening out couldn’t be decribed as anything less than grist to the fiction-writer’s mill; and more enjoyable – although I didn’t say it – than the tedium of what might have been.