When she woke up he was civil to her, kissed her chastely, told her he had no way of making breakfast in his room, not even coffee. She didn’t seem bothered by his distance and he felt some relief that she wasn’t being demanding or romantic. Maybe, he thought, her feelings were as complex as his.
It was only after she’d gone that he looked around his room, noticed the sheet of jagged-edged hardboard lying on the floor and saw that the final piece had been added to his jigsaw puzzle of London.
THE WALKER’S DIARY WRAPAROUND
It’s come as some surprise to discover just how much pleasure writing this diary gives me. I don’t quite know who I’m writing it for, but I have a sense that I’m not doing it only for myself. Perhaps I have half an eye on posterity. I hope that isn’t too silly or arrogant of me. I used to try to write when I was a soppy adolescent, and later when I first met Anita she encouraged me. She suggested I write a highly personal guide book to London, but I always thought there were enough unreliable guides to London. I didn’t want to add to the pile.
Besides, the problem I’ve always had with writing was that I could never finish anything. Personally I rather like the idea of unfinished works or interrupted masterpieces (‘Kubla Khan’, Edwin Drood), although I can see how a lot of people wouldn’t. But with a diary that’s not a problem. It ends where it ends. It can’t be a beautifully shaped artificial form. It’s the same shape as a human life. It ends because the life of the diarist ends. If you need to have a reasonable excuse for not finishing something, then death seems to me like the best excuse of all.
♦
I was sitting in a square formica booth in a snack bar in the Charing Cross Road, nursing a cappuccino in a worn white cup, pretending to read my paper. It was mid-morning and the place was empty apart from me and someone in the next booth, a woman aged about twenty-five. I am no longer shy about staring at people. I saw she had a sharp, narrow face, completely without make-up, but as I watched she began to apply mascara, eye-liner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil. Her eyes were set wide apart and they looked tired and sad and innocent, but as she worked on them they became more defined, more hard-edged, sexier. A slick of metallic blue and grey formed itself above each of her eyes, and finally she drew two long kitten points leading away from the outer comers. It made her look a little Japanese (and of course I thought about Judy). The woman worked hard, continually checking progress in a small circular hand mirror, and it took a long time. It didn’t look like a labour of love exactly, but it was something she knew she had to do.
I have been trying not to make assumptions about the people I see in London, not to jump to conclusions to reinforce the boring, limiting stereotypes. But if I had been forced to guess I would have said she was not a Londoner, not a native, that she was perhaps a tourist, though not on her first visit to England, or more likely a foreign student. I saw that she had a map on the table in front of her, but it was tattered and well-used.
At last the eyes were finished. I wondered if she was about to start on her lips, but she wasn’t. She put her make-up away, finished the coffee she’d been drinking and she was ready to go. As she got up she slipped on a pair of wraparound shades that completely hid her eyes.
♦
Walked along Wimpole Mews, the place where Johnny Edge-combe came looking for Christine Keeler and emptied a gun into the front door when Mandy Rice-Davies wouldn’t open it, finally taking a pot shot at her when she appeared at a window. Edgecome was only captured after a long siege at his home, somewhere far less desirable and glamorous than Wimpole Mews.
♦
I think the world is divided between those for whom time passes too quickly and those for whom it passes too slowly.
London is probably more enjoyable for people in the latter category than in the former.
The act of getting from A to B, whether it’s by public transport or in a cab or by car or on foot, always absorbs massive amounts of time. Partly it’s the matter of distances between places, the density of traffic, the inefficiency of public transport, but I suspect it’s more than that. The sheer nature of the city saps your energy and your ability to function. It’s fine if you want to kill time, you just make a short journey and before you know it you’ve lost an hour or more.
However, if you’re one of those people who’s always short of time the same rules apply, London still takes it out of you and that must be as maddening and frustrating as hell.
♦
In Lord North Street, a sign surviving from the war, painted on brick: “Public shelters in vaults under pavements in this street.”
♦
In Denmark Street (what used to be called Tin-Pan Alley), a young man with rock star looks and clothes was unloading guitars and taking them into a music shop. His image was very cool and hip and yet he seemed uncomfortable and self-conscious. I couldn’t think why but when he went to get the second load I saw that he was taking the guitars out of a Reliant three-wheeler, and a sweet old man, his father I thought, was sitting patiently at the wheel, doing a good turn, to his son’s excruciating embarrassment.
♦
In Ilderton Road, Rotherhithe, I saw a red sportscar with six raw eggs smashed on the bonnet.
♦
In New Cross, a shop specializing in chess sets, one of them consisting of London landmarks, with cab shelters as pawns, the Tower of London as rooks, St Paul’s Cathedral as bishops, equestrian statues of Cromwell as knights, the Post Office Tower as the king, and Thorneycroft’s statue of Boadicea as the queen.
♦
London always seems so strange in old movies. It’s more or less the London I recognize but it’s only ever half as full. There’s no traffic on the roads, there are no double yellow lines, no cars parked bumper to bumper. The hero’s car always finds a parking spot right outside Buckingham Palace or the Ritz, and nobody ever has to wait around for change from taxi drivers.
♦
I remember when I was a boy I used to read about India, and how on the streets of Calcutta people slept in shop doorways, and I was always very envious. It seemed so easy and convenient. If I went to London with my parents we had to worry about somewhere to stay, somewhere that needed to be booked in advance, that mightn’t measure up to my parents’ high standards, where the sheets might not be very clean, where the service might be unobliging, where the food might be bad. Today I see people sleeping in the shop doorways of London and I wonder if this is a sort of progress.
♦
In Amhurst Road, Hackney, a house with a bay window. The curtains were drawn, and there was a photograph of Peter Wyngarde as Jason King tucked into the window frame for passers-by to see.
In the front garden of a house in Navarino Road there was a seven-foot-high abstract black metal sculpture of a man.
The window of a basement in Greenwood Road, no curtains and inside a harsh strip light and several women dressed in white at sewing machines stitching pieces of white material together: a sign outside saying ‘Dressmaker’.
In Stoke Newington Church Street the building above a greengrocer’s was still painted with advertisements for a much earlier business. The biggest of the advertisements said, “Have your fountain pen repaired here.” What a wonderful, safe, decent world that invokes; not only a world where people actually used fountain pens (which seems quaint and old — fashioned enough in itself), but a world where somebody found it worth his while to repair them, where he could stay in business and make a living by doing it.