Mind the geraniums! he said. I keep them out here to water them every morning.
They smell so strong!
Bloody cranesbill, he said, or in Latin: Geranium sanguineum.
I picked one of the leaves and sniffed it. It reminded me of her hair.
During the war ordinary soap was scarce, and there were no shampoos, unless you bought them on the black market. So newly washed hair smelt of itself. I remember her washing her hair in the morning after getting out of bed. It was summer and warm, and the windows were open. She washed it in an enamel handbasin which she filled with water from an enamel jug. There was no hot water in Colette’s flat. Then she came back, with a towel wrapped round her head and nothing else on, lay down on the bed beside me and waited until her hair dried.
St Paul’s, Hubert said, there’s nothing else to match it! And built in record time, only thirty-five years! Work began nine years after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and it was finished in 1710. Christopher Wren was still around to see his masterpiece inaugurated.
He was reciting, almost word for word, what we had been obliged to learn by heart in the History of Architecture class. We were also obliged to go and draw the cathedral. It had survived many air raids unscathed, and had become a great patriotic monument. Churchill was filmed speaking in front of it. And when I drew its architectural details, I added Spitfire fighters in the sky behind!
The first time it was neither she nor I who made a choice. I had come to visit Colette after an evening class. We ate some soup. The three of us talked and it grew late. There was an air-raid warning. We switched off the lights and opened a window to watch the searchlights raking the sky above the trees in Coram’s Fields. The raiders didn’t seem especially near.
Sleep here, Colette proposed. It’s better than going out. We can all sleep in this bed, it’s large enough for four.
Which is what we did. Colette slept against the wall, she in the middle, and I on the outside. We took off most of our clothes but not all.
When we woke up, Colette was making toast and pouring cups of tea, and she and I were entangled together, legs and arms interlaced. We were not surprised by this, for both of us were aware of something more surprising: during the night each of us had put to sleep the other’s sex, not by satisfying it, or by denying it, but by following a different desire which even today it’s hard to name. No clinical descriptions fit. Perhaps it could only have happened in London during the spring of 1943. We found in each other’s arms a way of leaving together, a transport elsewhere. We arranged ourselves, fitted ourselves together as if we were making a sleigh or a skateboard. (Only skateboards didn’t yet exist.) Our destination wasn’t important. Any departure was to an erogenous zone. What mattered was the distance we put behind us. We fed each other distance with every lick. Wherever our skins touched there was the promise of an horizon.
I stepped back into Hubert’s bedroom, and noticed that it was different from the rest of the house. There was a double bed in the corner, but Gwen had never slept up here. This room was provisional — as though during the last decade Hubert had been camping here. The walls were entirely covered with images of plants and flowers — unframed prints, drawings, photographs, pages torn from books — and they were placed so close together that they looked almost like a wallpaper. Many were attached by drawing pins, and they made me think that he was constantly rearranging them. Except for the slippers under the bed and the collection of medicines on the bedside table, it looked like a student’s room.
He noticed my interest and he pointed to a drawing, perhaps one of his own: Strange flower, no? Like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song! It originally came from Brazil. In English it’s known as Birthwort. In Latin: Aristolochia elegans. Somewhere Lévi-Strauss says something about the Latin name of a plant. He says the Latin name personalises it. Birthwort is merely a species. Aristolochia elegans is a person, singular and unique. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name. Which you wouldn’t do, if you knew it as Birthwort.
I was standing by the French windows. Shall I shut them? I asked.
Yes, do.
You always sleep with the windows shut?
Funny you should ask that, for recently it has been something of a problem. Before it was simple — I left them open all night. Now, before I go to bed, I open them. The house is so narrow it tends to be stuffy as soon as all the windows are shut. The other night I thought of the clerks who lived here when the house was new. Compared to us, they had very little space in their lives. Cramped offices, cramped horse-buses, cramped streets, cramped rooms. Then, come the small hours, before it’s light, I get out of bed again and I go and shut the windows, so that when the street wakes up in the morning it’s quiet.
You sleep late?
I wake up early, very early. I think I shut the windows because I need a kind of protection at the beginning of each new day. For some time now I’ve needed calm in the morning so I can face it. Every day you have to decide to be invincible.
I understand.
I doubt it, John. I’m a solitary man. Come, I’ll show you the garden.
I had never before seen a garden like this one. It was full of bushes, flowers, shrubs, each flourishing, yet planted so close together it was impossible for a stranger to imagine finding a way between them. A single path led down to the canal and it was so tight one could only go down it walking sideways. Yet the density of the foliage was not like that of a jungle, but like the density of a closed book, which has to be read page by page. I spotted Michaelmas daisies, Winter jasmine, Powder-puff hollyhocks and, bordering the path, Ribbon Grass known as Lady’s Laces, and a citronella plant whose leaves, shaped like tongues, were growing in such a way, and had placed themselves in such an arrangement, that each was accommodated within the other’s space. Each had found a position beside, or under, or over, or between, or around, its neighbouring leaves that allowed it to receive some light, to bend with the wind, to probe in its natural direction. And the whole impenetrable garden was like this.
There was nothing here when we came, said Hubert, not even grass. It had been used for years as a dump for all the houses along the terrace. A dump behind the brothel. Old baths, a gas stove, smashed prams, rotten rabbit-hutches. Try some of these grapes.
He stepped up to a vine growing against a brick wall that separated the garden from the neighbour’s. Over each bunch of grapes he had placed a plastic bag to prevent the birds from eating them. He inserted his long hand inside one of these bags and, with his fingers, detached a few small white grapes, the colour of cloudy honey, and placed them on the palm of my hand.
The next time I went to Colette’s flat in Guildford Place it was understood from the start that I would spend the night there. Colette slept on another bed in the second room. I took off all my clothes and she put on her loose embroidered nightdress. We discovered the same thing as last time. Once put together, we could leave. We travelled from bone to bone, from continent to continent. Sometimes we spoke. Not sentences, not endearments. The names of parts and places. Tibia and Timbuktu, Labia and Lapland, Earhole and Oasis. The names of the parts became pet names, the names of the places, passwords. We weren’t dreaming. We simply became the Vasco da Gama of our two bodies. We paid the closest attention to each other’s sleep, we never forgot one another. When she was deeply asleep her breathing was like surf. You took me to the bottom, she told me one morning.
We did not become lovers, we were scarcely friends, and we had little in common. I was not interested in horses, and she wasn’t interested in the Freedom Press. When our paths crossed in the art school we had nothing to say to each other. This didn’t worry us. We exchanged light kisses — on the shoulder or the back of the neck, never on the mouth — and we continued on our separate ways, like an elderly couple who happened to be working in the same school. As soon as it became dark, whenever we could, we met to do the same thing: to pass the whole night in each other’s arms and, like this, to leave, to go elsewhere. Repeatedly.