“She loved cafes, I think because the life that goes on in them, though domestic and comfortable, can’t claim you in any way: there is nothing for you to join in. ‘I like my tea in peace,’ she told me every week. ‘Once in a while I like to have my tea in peace.’
“Whatever she ate she coughed and choked demurely over it, and for some time afterwards; and she always kept on her light green raincoat with its nacreous, gold-edged buttons.
“When I remember Piccadilly it isn’t so much by the flocks of starlings which invaded the gardens at the end of every short winter afternoon, filling the paths with their thick mouldy smell and sending up a loud mechanical shrieking which drowned out the traffic, as by the clatter of pots, the smell of marzipan or a match just struck, wet woollen coats hung over one another in a corner, voices reduced in the damp warm air to an intimate buzz out of which you could just pick a woman at another table saying, ‘Anyway, as long as you can get about,’ to which her friend answered immediately,
“ ‘Oh, it’s something, isn’t it? Yes.’
“On a rainy afternoon in November it made you feel only half awake. A waitress brought us the ashtray. She put it down in front of me. ‘It’s always the gentleman who smokes,’ she said. I looked at my grandmother sulkily, wondering where we would have to go next. At Boots she had found the top floor changed round again, suddenly full of oven gloves, clocks, infrared grills; and a strong smell of burning plastic had upset her in the arcades between Deansgate and Market Street.
“Along the whole length of the room we were in ran a tinted window, through which you could see the gardens in the gathering twilight, paths glazed with drizzle giving back the last bit of light in the sky, the benches and empty flower beds grey and equivocal-looking, the sodium lamps coming on by the railings. Superimposed, on the inside of the glass, was the distant reflection of the cafe: it was as if someone had dragged all the chairs and tables out into the gardens, where the serving women waited behind a stainless-steel counter, wiping their faces with a characteristic gesture in the steam from the bain marie, unaware of the wet grass, the puddles, the blackened but energetic pigeons bobbing round their feet.
“As soon as I had made this discovery a kind of tranquillity came over me. My grandmother seemed to recede, speaking in charged hypnotic murmurs. The rattle of cutlery and metal trays reached me only from a great distance as I watched people come into the gardens laughing. They were able to pass without difficulty through the iron railings; the wind and rain had no effect on them. They rubbed their hands and sat down to eat squares of dry Battenburg cake and exclaim ‘Mm’ how good it was. There they sat, out in the cold, smiling at one another: they certainly were a lot more cheerful out there. A man on his own had a letter which he opened and read.
“ ‘Dear Arthur,’ it began.
“He chuckled and nodded, tapping a line here and there with his finger as if he was showing the letter to someone else, while the waitresses went to and fro around him, for the most part girls with white legs and flat shoes, some of whom buttoned the top of their dark blue overalls lower than others. They carried trays with a thoughtless confidence, and spoke among themselves in a language I longed to understand, full of ellipses, hints, and abrupt changes of subject, in which the concrete things were items and prices. I wanted to go and join them. Their lives, I imagined, like the lives of everyone in the gardens, were identical to their way of walking between the tables-a neat, safe, confident movement without a trace of uncertainty, through a medium less restrictive than the one I was forced to inhabit.
“ ‘Yes, love’ I would say to introduce myself. ‘Thank you, love. Anything else, love? Twenty pence then, thank you, love, eighty pence change, next please. Did Pam get those drop earrings in the end, then? No, love, only fried.’
“ ‘I think it’s just as well not to be,’ they might reply. Or with a wink and a shout of laughter, ‘Margaret’s been a long time in the you-know-where. She’ll be lucky!’
“At the centre or focal point of the gardens, from which the flower beds fell back modestly in arcs, a statue stood. Along its upraised arms drops of water gathered, trembled in the wind, fell. One of the girls walked up and put her tray on a bench next to it. She buried her arms brusquely in the plinth of the statue and brought out a cloth to wipe her hands. This done, she stared ahead absently, as if she had begun to suspect she was caught up in two worlds. Though she belonged to neither her image dominated both of them, a big plain patient girl of seventeen or eighteen with chipped nail varnish and a tired back from sorting cutlery all morning. Suddenly she gave a delighted laugh.
“She looked directly out at me and waved. She beckoned. I could see her mouth open and close to make the words ‘Here! Over here!’
“She’s alive, I thought. It was a shock. I felt that I was alive, too. I got up and ran straight into the plate-glass window and was concussed. Someone dropped a tray of knives. I heard a peculiar voice, going away from me very fast, say: ‘What’s he done? Oh, what’s he done now?’ Then those first ten or twelve years of my life were sealed away from me neatly like the bubble in a spirit level-clearly visible but strange and inaccessible, made of nothing. I knew immediately that though what I had seen was not Viriconium, Viriconium nevertheless awaited me. I knew, too, how to find it.”
People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?
“You would learn nothing from Dr. Petromax’s mirror even if you could find it,” Mr. Ambrayses said dismissively. “First exhaust the traditional avenues of the research.” And as if in support of his point he brought me a cardboard box he had found among the rubbish on a building site in Halifax, the words World Mosaic printed boldly across its lid. But my face was down to the bone with ambition.
Old people sit more or less patiently in railway carriages imagining they have bought a new bathroom suite, lavender, with a circular bath they will plumb-in themselves. April comes, the headlines read, BIBLE BOY MURDERED; KATIE IN NUDE SHOCK. The sun moves across the patterned bricks outside the bus station, where the buses are drawn up obliquely in a line: from the top deck of one you can watch in the next a girl blowing her nose. You don’t think you can bear to hear one more woman in Sainsbury’s saying to her son as she shifts her grip on her plastic shopping bag with its pink and grey Pierrot, “Alec, get your foot off the biscuits. I shan’t tell you again. If you don’t get your foot off the biscuits, Alec, I shall knock it straight on the floor.”
April again. When the sun goes in, a black wind tears the crocus petals off and flings them down the ring road.
“I can’t wait,” I told Mr. Ambrayses.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I followed Dr. Petromax from the Blue Rooms (“Meals served all day”) to the Alpine Coffee House, Merrie England, the Elite Cafe amp; Fish Restaurant. I let him tell me his story in each of them. Though details changed, it remained much the same: but I was certain he was preparing himself to say more. One day I kept quiet until he had ended as usual, “Viriconium nevertheless awaited me,” then I said openly to him:
“And yet you’ve never been there. You had the clue as a child. You found the doorway but you never went through it.”
We were in the El Greco, at the pedestrian end of New Street. While he waited for the waitress he stared across the wide flagged walk, with its beech saplings and raised flower beds, at the window of C amp;A’s, his sore brown eyes full of patience between their bruised-looking lids. When she came she brought him plaice and chips. “Oh, hello!” she said. “We haven’t seen you for a while! Feeling any better?” He ate the chips one by one with his fork, pouring vinegar on them between every mouthful, only afterwards scraping the white of the plaice off its slippery fragile skin until he had the one in a little pile on the side of the plate and the other intact, glistening slightly, webbed with grey, in the middle. His dirty hands were as deft and delicate as a boy’s at this. Once or twice he looked up at me and then down again.