And so he began to do this more and more. As he became more and more unkempt, more and more frantic and bizarre and unpresentable, as he festered in his Marylebone basement, scrounged for odd jobs, lived without friends, without a work permit, with even his police papers obsolete -more and more often, as he metamorphosed into this hollow-eyed wanderer through the higher-toned city streets, he began to pick out women. Women who reminded him of something; of someone. Of his dream model, that is. The fantasy girl who would become his inspiration, the muse of his resurgence – and his lover, of course; or so the tired fantasy went. He would pick them out, and he would follow them. For a day, for a few days. Until the resemblance inexplicably faded.
But this one – oh, he told himself, she was the best of them, no question. Yes, yes, he did believe she was his Lizzie Siddal to the life.
He tailed her for four days. Trailed her to her home. Lurked outside by the iron gates of the overgrown garden at Thurloe Square. He watched her figure through the privacy curtains on the ground floor. He yearned with raw eyes. He scratched at his ragged beard as if there were lice in it – maybe there were. Or he stood as if breathless, his hands in the pockets of his stained trench coat or tugging now and then at the shiny slacks that had become too large for his spindly frame. And she – she passed in and out beneath the white columns of the house’s portico. She kissed her husband in the doorway when the limousine came to collect him. She walked her little boy to school. Had tea with friends. She visited the shops on Walton Street and Beauchamp Place. It thrilled him to watch her through the shop windows, cosseted and sedate, serious in her consideration of fine clothes and bangles. He thought of Lizzie Siddal, indeed, in her modest bonnet shop, where Deverell had discovered her, and whence he brought her to his studio to model for him. And how she’d modeled then for Hunt, and for Millais, who painted her as the drowned Ophelia, making her pose clothed in an ill-warmed bath until she came down with a fever. That picture was in the Tate now, among the other Pre-Raphaelites. He visited it often and stood before it, staring, bouncing on his toes. He considered her to have been – Siddal – the very image of Men’s Longing for the Lost Thing. And in the end, he thought, in the end, she belonged to Rossetti only. She was his model alone. His Beatrice, his Delia, his muse, his wife at last. ‘One face looks out from all his canvases, one selfsame figure sits or walks or leans…’
He learned the woman’s name one morning when her husband’s Financial Times jammed the letter slot. Jane Abbot: he read it off the letters stuck half-way.
What pictures he could make of her, he thought grandly, breathing hoarsely, as he stood so close to her, just outside her front door. What a world he too could make of myth and of remembrance.
Of course, he’d thought all this before, about other women, while following other women. That’s what he did these days, after all, hang around shadowing girls and thinking such things. It was easier than actually painting, wasn’t it? – a fact which sat heavily even on him now, even as he tagged after this latest.
But then, on the Thursday – on Thursday night – there came the added element. He recognized the moment as if he had been waiting for it. And the whole hankering, romantic operation was transformed into this other business.
It was late. It was drizzling, chilly. He pushed his hands together in his pockets to draw the trench coat closed: its belt was lost and two of its three buttons had fallen off long ago. He was at his post by the iron fence, gazing at her windows still though she’d drawn the curtains at darkfall as the English do. He was shivering. He was ready to go home.
It surprised him when she came out – it was nearly ten. But she stepped across the threshold briskly, in all innocence it seemed. She smiled back over her shoulder, waved goodbye as she shut the door. He expected her to head for the brown Mercedes she’d left parked down the street, or to walk over to Brompton and hail a cab. He figured he was going to lose her right away like that. But the moment the door was closed, she paused where she was, her face alert. Standing under the portico, she scanned the area. He had to turn away before she spotted him. He pretended to walk off toward the end of the road where the V and A loomed against the broken clouds. By the time he turned back, she was going in the opposite direction, had passed the Mercedes. Was hurrying round the corner, her heels clicking on the pavement, to Pelham Street, which led to the South Kensignton tube station. He turned back and went after her, taking long strides. His decaying tennis shoes made no noise at all.
He still couldn’t believe she would take the underground until he trailed her into the station and saw her start down the stairs. He’d never seen her use the tube before. The first thought that occurred to him – naturally enough – was that she didn’t want to leave a record of her movements; she didn’t want anyone to find out where she’d gone, or to follow her. It was a thrilling thought, almost too thrilling to believe: that she was thinking about someone following her. It added a sudden value to his position, a telepathic intimacy.
She wore a long, brown raincoat, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low. The way she waited at the far end of the platform, the way she kept her face turned away, toward the tracks – yes, he was convinced she was trying to go unnoticed.
On the train, seated in a corner, she read a paperback novel, her head down. He watched her cautiously from the other end of the car. Already, he couldn’t believe his luck.
It rained harder, grew colder, he warmed himself by a bonfire of the mind. They had built one – a bonfire – by the Siddal grave in Highgate. He thought of that, shivering, standing inside the phone booth, watching through the rain-streaked glass, watching the cafe across the street, waiting for her.
The cafe was off Piccadilly Circus, in that tangle of lanes that’s not quite Soho; a no-man’s land. At this hour, the place went clubby, and it drew freaks. Even now, a line of them was forming at the door, shaved head after dyed hair after ringed nose after tattooed cheek; leather bodies hunkered under black umbrellas. It was a hell of a crowd for her to mix with. He could hear the bass of the music in there thumping. He could see film-light and video-glow flickering on the windows. She had been inside about twenty minutes now.
His teeth began to chatter. He imagined the bonfire against the night sky, above the cemetery. When Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal died – a laudanum overdose – February, 1862 – Rossetti, her painter, her husband, had laid his unpublished poems in her coffin. A calf-bound packet of them; they were buried with her; placed between her consumptive cheek and her rich hair. Her red-gold hair. They say it keeps growing after you die, your hair. They say that Lizzie Siddal’s hair spilled out of her coffin and was still luxurious, still red-gold some seven years later, when they dug her up. Rossetti needed money by then. He needed to publish the poems he’d buried with her. Two of his friends were on hand to watch the exhumation by bonfirelight, and to pry the packet of poems from what had been her face, to draw inspiration one more time from that singular face…