‘Heppy days,’ said Dieter.
‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ I replied. Alcohol makes me more American. ‘I suppose this is a commission?’
‘From a rich American,’ he said. ‘For this one I get fifteen thousand pounds.’
‘Not nearly enough. People are getting fifty thousand pounds for unemptied chamber pots these days and the pots aren’t even new. This thing here is museum-standard work — you should have got at least fifty thousand pounds.’
‘What did you get for the gorilla?’
‘Thirty thousand.’ At this Dieter’s lower jaw dropped. I’d paid him twenty-five hundred for the mechanism and motor but that left me with twenty-seven thousand five hundred for a crash-dummy primate that was nothing compared to the whole little horror show he’d put together for fifteen thousand.
‘Your millionaire is bigger than mine then,’ said Dieter. He shook his head philosophically and poured us both another Marillenschnaps.
I looked at the toy again. The sound was off; the dreadful hopping creature had returned to its original position among the trees, the man to his on the path. This scaled-down replication of an imaginary scene held a fascination that was disturbing. I turned from it to St Eustace on his horse on the wall. When I pressed the button the little Jesus appeared between the antlers of the stag and Eustace leapt from the saddle and knelt as before. ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,’ crooned Bing Crosby.
‘Do you ever feel like hopping through the woods and doing what the hopping creature does?’ I asked Dieter.
‘All the time,’ he answered, and raised his glass to me.
19 Sarah Varley
Sometimes little good things happen, like a break in heavy grey clouds and a bit of blue sky shining through; I read in The Times the other day that a secret buyer had acquired all of Maria Callas’s underwear that was being auctioned in Paris and vowed to burn it to save her ‘dignity and honour’: definitely a bit of blue sky, that.
There’s been a lot of rain lately and I’m surprised at how often I find myself on the banks of the Euphrates; that’s an operatic allusion, and I can’t do many of those because I know very little about opera. Giles and I used to go to the ENO sometimes but I hadn’t been for years when Linda gave me a ticket for Nabucco; she was going to visit a daughter who was ill and she wouldn’t take any money for the ticket. I’ll get to the Euphrates shortly.
I wanted to give myself time for a leisurely coffee before the seven-thirty start of the opera, so I left the house at quarter-past six. It was warm for December and raining. The houses and shops were aggressive with Christmas illumination and decorations; the lamps on Parsons Green and the two lantern-like telephone boxes, the figures in ones and twos moving into and out of the lamplight all heightened the singleness of my footsteps. The platform at the top of the station stairs was bustling and festive with people coming and going with shopping bags, and the houses and flats they were coming from or going to were made cosy in my imagination because of the rain all around us.
When I changed to the Piccadilly Line at Earls Court the early evening crush wasn’t too bad and I found a seat, took Middlemarch out of my bag — I’d first read it years ago — and settled down comfortably with it. I couldn’t help shaking my head and smiling at Mrs Cadwallader’s remark on page 537 of my Penguin edition: ‘“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”’ After a few moments I stopped smiling. I don’t care about calling things by the same names as other people but I was wondering whether I’d always called things by the names that were true for me: what I had with Giles, for example. We’d gone to the opera, to concerts, to films; we’d done what lovers do and I’d chosen him as a life partner. He turned out to be a non-finisher, a faller-by-the-wayside. Had I wanted someone I could work on and improve? Was I a faller-by-the-wayside-saver?
Going up the escalator at Leicester Square I passed a young couple kissing on the down escalator and I remembered when Giles and I had done that on that same moving stairs.
VAUXHALL WORKERS’ SHOCK AT CLOSURE, said the Evening Standard headline as I came out of the station. Over the road Leicester Square presented itself as Hell in modern dress, swarming and throbbing, its noise made visible in neon and glittering lights. BEST COMEDY, flaunted the sign under the marquee of Wyndham’s Theatre on this side of Charing Cross Road. RICHLY PERCEPTIVE, SPARKLING, boasted the critical quotes hanging there. ‘Big Issue,’ said a vendor.
Although I always exert myself to keep sane I’m not always sure that I’m calling things by the same names I used to call them by. GABY’S DELI in glittering metallic letters over the yellow awning — was that the name when Giles and I had hot salt-beef sandwiches there? Est. 1965, so only the sign was new. The tastes came back to me of the too-muchness of salt beef, mustard, rye bread, beer, and the simple pleasure of gluttony. No one had ever heard of mad cows back then.
Is it a sign of growing old, I wonder, when the faces coming towards you in the street are full of stories that you don’t want to know? Here now were Cecil Court and Lipman & Sons Formal Wear, reassuringly itself and staunch through the years with correct attire for morning and evening. As I walked through the rain towards St Martin’s Lane in the lamplit and quickstepping darkness the shops on both sides held out their racks and windows to me, entreating me to buy old books, rare books, prints and maps, antiques old and new, ephemera, esoterica, and works on the occult. Stuart and Watkins! No, now they were just Watkins Books. Had they always had ibis-headed Thoth on their signboard? That’s where I bought my copy of I Ching and Giles bought his Tarot cards. Living with Zen was currently being featured in their windows. It was always difficult for me to walk past the maps at Edward Storey’s Ltd without buying one; I can’t help feeling there’s a place they want to show me but I’ve never taken the chance for fear of falling off the edge of my world. There were prints as well, and the people bent over them assumed, as always, the postures in which Daumier painted print-browsers. I suppose the postures for every action are always there and successive generations fall into them.
This rainy evening in Cecil Court seemed always to have been there with its pavement glistening under the many footsteps; even when the sun is shining Cecil Court is a reservoir of yesterdays, a pool of grey light in which moments long gone surface like carp rising to be fed.
St Martin’s Lane, of course, was all go, with a posh new anonymous hotel and CAFÉ ST MARTIN’S PIZZA confronting me when I left Cecil Court and crossed through the taxis to the English National Opera side. Linda had recommended Aroma coffee so I wove through the pedestrian traffic until I saw it just before the ENO.