The size of the peaches varied considerably, from ones large enough to fill the hand, to small ones no bigger than billiard balls. The skin of the smaller ones, being finer, had a tendency to wrinkle very slightly when the fruit was bruised or overripe.
Those wrinkles often reminded us of warm skin in the fold of a dark arm.
In the centre you found a stone, with the texture of a dark bark and an aspect as sulphurous as a meteorite.
These wild peaches were the fruit made by God for thieves.
Greengages
We looked for greengages every year during the month of August. Frequently they disappointed. Either they were unripe, fibrous, almost dry, or else they were over-soft and mushy. Many were not worth biting into, for one could feel with one’s finger that they did not have the right temperature: a temperature unfindable in Celsius or Fahrenheit: the temperature of a particular coolness surrounded by sunshine. The temperature of a small boy’s fist.
The boy is somewhere between eight and ten-and-a-half years old, the age of independence, before the press of adolescence. The boy holds the greengage in his hand, brings it to his mouth, bites, and the fruit darts its tongue against the back of his throat so that he swallows its promise.
A promise of what? Of something that has not yet been named and he will soon name. He tastes a sweetness which no longer has anything to do with sugar, but with a limb which goes on and on, and seems to have no end. The limb belongs to a body which he can only see with his eyes shut. The body has three more limbs and a neck and ankles and is like his own; except that it is inside out. Through the limb without end flows a sap — he can taste it between his teeth — the sap of a nameless pale wood, which he calls girl-tree.
It was enough that one greengage in a hundred reminded us of that.
Cherries
In cherries, there was the flavour of fermentation as in no other fruit. Picked straight from the tree, they tasted of enzymes laced with the sun and this taste was complementary with the special shiny polish of their skins.
Eat cherries — even one hour after they have been picked — and their taste blends with that of their own rottenness. In the gold or red of their colour there is always a hint of brown: the colour into which they will soften and disintegrate.
The cherry refreshes, not on account of its purity — as does the apple — but by slightly, almost imperceptibly, tickling the tongue with the effervescence of its fermenting.
Because of the small size of the cherry and the lightness of its flesh and the insubstantiality of its skin, the cherry stone was always incongruous. The eating of the cherry never quite prepared you for its stone. When you spat it out, it seemed to have little connection with the flesh that surrounded it. It felt more like a precipitate of your own body, a precipitate mysteriously produced by the act of eating cherries. After each cherry, you spat out a cherry tooth.
Lips, as distinct from the rest of the face, have the same gloss as cherries do and the same malleability. Both their skins are like the skin of a liquid. A question of their capillary surfaces. Make a test to see whether our memory is correct or whether the dead exaggerate. Put a cherry in your mouth, don’t bite it yet, now for a split second remark how the density, the softness and the resilence of the fruit match perfectly the nature of your lips which hold it.
Quetsch
A dark, small, oval plum, not much longer than a human eye. When they are ripe in September on the tree, they glance between the leaves. Quetsches.
Ripe, their colour is a blackish-purple, but their skin, unless when handling it you rub it off with your fingers, has a bloom on it: a bloom the colour of blue wood-smoke. These two colours made us think of drowning and flying at the same time.
Their pale yellowy-green flesh is both sweetish and astringent, so that its taste is a serrated one — like the blade of a minute saw along which you gently run your tongue. The quetsch doesn’t seduce as the greengage does.
The trees were always planted near the house. During the winter, looking out through the window, we saw each day small birds searching for food and assembling and perching on the branches. Finches, robins, tits, sparrows and an occasional poaching magpie. In the spring, before the blossom flowered, the same small birds would sing in the quetsch tree.
There is another reason why they are the fruit of song. From barrels full of quetsch, when the fruit were fermented, we distilled illegal gnôle, plum brandy, slivovitz. And sparkling little glasses of this invariably prompted us to sing songs of love, solitude and endurance.
5 Islington
The borough of Islington has, during the last twenty-five years, become fashionable. In the fifties and sixties, the name Islington, when pronounced in central London or in the north-western suburbs, conjured up a remote and faintly suspect district. It is interesting to note how poor and therefore uneasy districts, even when they are geographically near a city centre, are pushed, in the imagination of those who are prospering, further away than they really are. Harlem in New York is an obvious example. For Londoners today Islington is far closer than it used to be.
When it was still remote, forty years ago, Hubert bought a small terraced house there, with a narrow back garden that sloped down to a canal. At that time he and his wife were teaching part-time in art schools and had no money to spare. The house, however, was cheap, dirt cheap.
They’ve moved to Islington! a friend told me at the time. And this news was like a late autumn afternoon when the daylight hours are becoming noticeably shorter. There was something of a foreclosure about it.
Soon afterwards, I went to live abroad. Occasionally over the years and on visits to London, I saw Hubert at the house of a common friend, but I never visited — until three days ago — his house in Islington. He and I had been students together at the same London art school in 1943. He was studying Textile Design and I was studying Painting, but there were certain classes we attended together: Life Drawing, History of Architecture, Human Anatomy.
He made an impression on me because of his fastidious persistence. He invariably wore a tie. He looked like a nineteenth-century bookbinder. He tended to be in a state of sad shock provoked by recurring modern stupidities, and his nails were always clean. I wore a long black Romantic overcoat and looked like a coachman — also of the nineteenth century. I drew with the blackest charcoal I could find, and to find any at all during the war wasn’t easy — who had time in ’41 or ’42 to be burning charcoal? Sometimes I filched a stick from the teacher’s supply; two kinds of theft were justifiable: Food for the hungry, Basic Materials for the artist.
The two of us were undoubtedly suspicious of one another. Hubert must have thought I was over-demonstrative and indiscreet to the point of exhibitionism; he seemed to me to be a tight-lipped elitist.
Nevertheless we listened to one another and would sometimes drink a beer together or share an apple. We were both aware that we were each considered by most of the other students to be deranged. Deranged because of our commitment to working at every possible moment. Practically nothing distracted us. Hubert drew from the model with the attentive restrained movements of a violinist tuning his instrument; I drew like a kitchen boy slapping tomatoes and cheese on to pizzas waiting to be put into the oven. Our approaches were very different. Nevertheless during the breaks every hour, when the model took a rest, we were the only two who stayed in the studio and went on working. Hubert often improved his drawing, bringing it to a kind of equanimity. I usually ruined mine.