A memory from a brief period in the first half of life when I and a friend ran a stone carving and restoration business. Some names have been changed.
Brighton: the west pier. A cold morning in one’s prime, the shell of sleep torn away. The sea’s surface, cyan. Amidst the day’s beginnings the vivid dumbshow of a broken dream is momentarily reprised; the end of the reel, loath-to-depart, a gaze held as the vision dissipates. ‘Swear,’ cries the ghost under the stage. But the message is lost, the transposition complete. We live in a material world, the boast of our times. I’m booted, gloved, slamming the door, breathing the air, joining the firm. Equal to anything, hair flying, arms mighty, squinting into the bracing headwind, we bear down on our company truck, a superannuated relic from the seventies, languishing on the front, where I chose to leave it last night. I haul myself in and turn the key.
‘Er… is the battery connected?’
But Richard, out on the nearside, has seen its empty cradle and clamps; his face is ready at the window. The horizon beyond, gulls gliding.
‘What battery.’ Levelly. A window flashes open overhead: Embassy Court.
Uselessly I curse and strike the fascia, not for the first or last time. On the esplanade is a distant red kiosk: coins or card. ‘Has your car got any petrol in it?’
‘Some.’ He follows my gaze. ‘But it’s up in Hanover. A bit bloody asking for it, weren’t you, dumping this thing here? You’re not thinking of trying to tow it…’
‘No, I was thinking about another battery. Shall we just sort one out ourselves, then get this up to the garage. Clutch has just about gone.’
‘We can’t be arsing about with that all day.’ Throwing a glance at the sky. ‘I was going to fix those jambs at Harrietsham. And the mullion. Scaffolding comes down this week. And we still haven’t seen the last payment from English Heritage.’
‘Ah. Talked to them earlier. What’s-her-name, Colloquy. The architect. Wants to come to the yard, look at the stone. She’ll bring the cheque. ‘
‘Colquhoun, the loon. That’s all right then. Nothing better to do.’
‘Well – if by chance Phil can come down and get this going, and you get over to the site, I’ll do the meeting. She won’t stay long. Then see you out there about two.’
Richard assents graciously; the mechanic likewise receives my supplication. We turn and trudge back, each towards his digs. I fetch my old Raleigh, load it on the flatbed, climb aboard again myself, watch the mirror for Phil’s arrival.
Our stranded crate rolls in the slipstream of lorries and buses. I take out paper and pen; a client expects a letter, I can write anywhere. Or could, the last time I had to. Now I find it’s somehow beyond me. Something has extinguished all volition and seized up the gears of thought; sudden dread of no apparent cause. The inrush of a decuman wave from an infinite emptiness. Time slows almost to a halt. The wave thickens, as though the mass of the South Downs from the Devil’s Dyke to the sea were levigated into a vast bed of grout; a lurching, slipping inundation that crams down buoyant hope and inexorably engorges me. I am steeped in familiar despair. Something so debilitates the will that it cannot be repulsed. All at once, I might be a petrified mass on the lifeless moon, far below a blue world that waxes and wanes on the edge of mathematical and visible non-existence. But where this pall descends from it is impossible to understand, even when my faculties – eventually, temporarily – are relieved of it.
At the same time, autumn light and the smell of oil and vinyl, a recaptured ‘context of sensations,’ summon a memory from a quarter century ago. Finding its tailgate open I had inquisitively trespassed in the family car, clambered over the seats, slid down before the controls. The Light Programme: Can’t buy me love. The great wheel in my grip: Banjo spokes, M for Morris. I was Steve Zodiac, Fireballing to the galaxy’s hub. Then came the same sudden gravitation and panic; this same foundering; the same dark chasm. It was the moment at which I first perceived, in this aberration, my sequestration from the seemingly unoccluded contentment of others, as though I were uniquely tormented by grief, long before knowing that state at the usual appointments with experience. My father in search silently loomed in the windscreen, perplexed by his child’s abrupt abjectness of mien.
However, the present scheme plays out; I finally reach our workshop by bike. The door heaved aside, sunbeams fall on cream-coloured blocks, rubble, bankers, pallets, chisels, mallets, drags and buckets, in dusty repose. There is the anciently aspirant scent of cut limestone. I swiftly sweep the floor, on which shadows of leaves move ‘like silent lips’ (Hard Times)? Hark, tyres on the dirt road. A supercilious entrance: I capture the castle. As though sherry expected. Cold in here. She casts back a silk scarf. Detaches it from brim of preposterous hat. Checks shoes. Her bearded acolyte hesitates on the threshold, in the frame of broad bright day. As my half-closed eyes pick out the contour of Mount Caburn, his clerkish tenuity tends to invisibleness. I may dodge around him; plunge up those slopes.
‘Thank you for taking this trouble. I’m sure there’s a chair somewhere…’
‘Perfectly all right. Are those the carvings for the portico?’
‘The south portico. Combe Down. We were at the quarry last week.’
They don’t look terribly exciting. I mean, I like your drawings of course. But there’s not much calcite in these samples… and lovely ooliths. I’ve been out there myself. I drew squares around the bits I wanted. Mr. Hancock did say they’d be in this consignment…’ Finger on chin, interrogatively.
I pause for a second at the notion of the quarry owner dutifully extracting, between tea breaks, the most delectable cubes from the quarry wall with a dedicated diamond blade. ‘Well, these were in the last blocks wedged from the beds. There are some nice impurities. In fact… uh… this acanthus leaf has so much calcite on its face it almost couldn’t be carved.’
‘Oh yes. Rather splendid. The odd blemish is forgivable. As long as you remember the formula. Lime putty, stone dust, white cement. When you’re making up.’
‘It’s the best part of breaking up.’
A grin from the beard beside her. She gingerly picks up a dowel pin.
‘Stainless? And you are using bronze wire brushes on the old stonework.’
‘Certainly.’ Meanwhile that mysterious, visceral, vertiginous combination of alarm and stark futility, deepening by the hour, now seems accompanied by a retentive pressure to the head, as if this had become a voussoir in a Roman arch. Sight and sound seem sundered, colour dulled, limbs harder to animate. All is loathsome. I long for the conference to end.
‘Is it also you who does the carving? Or…’
‘Um. Actually I seem to have more of a flair for the fixing. Being outside, on the original structures. That is, I can do the banker work well enough but… coming to stone carving as a painter… I mean, you’re very kind about my drawings. I’m not sure that this is really my medium. To say that I’m an artist, you know.’
She has turned away from the stones and back towards the exit. ‘Yes. I’m sure we must all fervently hope that you find your medium.’ The languorous tone feels a little studied. ‘Anyway it all seems… quite satisfactory and I’m sure it will look jolly nice but can we get a move on. We really can’t go on holding things up while you have to mend your lorry, or whatever it is that keeps happening. Last week we’d nearly given you up for dead.’
I really am very sorry. It’s my fault… I’ve been a little… indisposed, but as you see Richard has been cracking on with the carving and it’s just a matter of the fixing and there’s no question that they’ll be in and finished before the cold weather arrives.’
‘Yes, well, you know. No fixing in freezing conditions.’
‘That’s right. No. It will be done.’
‘Fabulous. And I think you have a message on your answering machine, if you don’t mind my saying. It might possibly be my other colleague… he said he was going to…’
Some yards away, disclosed by impinging shadow, a neglected light pulses. I peer at it doubtfully, sidle between stacks of calcium carbonate and reach across the desk. ‘Your colleague. Right. I didn’t have time. I’ll just… ‘
The machine speaks. ‘It’s George. Need a hand at Stopham Bridge with those ironstone cutwaters. Two of my blokes off tomorrow. Would be nice, if you can.’
Colquhoun turns to her accomplice. ‘Duncan, that’s one of yours.’ To me: ‘I didn’t know you were involved. That project. No wonder…’
Beeping, clicking, then a lustful intake of breath, fiercely amplified.
‘Good afternoon! Phil at the garage. Are you going to come and collect this fucking heap of junk?’
No further messages. She clasps her hands and pushes them downwards, elbows in, shoulders raised, as though contemplating a pyramid of Piero Manzoni’s tin cans. I find my tongue. ‘George helps us sometimes and we do the same for him. We worked a few of the cutwaters. The bulk of our time at present is spent on the carvings.’
‘As it should be. Stopham is hardly a simple matter, either. Restoration is a privilege and not a task.’
‘Indeed.’ I hear myself expatiate wildly. ‘We’ve also had the privilege of restoring a window in Kent. Neo-gothic, not so old but it’s all fascinating stuff. That’s to be completed today. Then we’ll attend entirely to these. ‘
They consult watches. ‘I may be seeing you at Stopham, then.’ This from Duncan, eyebrows amiably raised.
‘Delighted.’
*
The village stores. I’ve never been here before. A sorry batch of pies in the crook of my arm, I fumble for cash. But Tom Baker is before me at the counter, looming over simpering shopkeepers. In three dimensions. Evidently a local. Hands in pockets, he takes momentary stock of me, standing astern. Same kind of hair, not so tall. Might not have noticed him but for knowing, like everyone else, his voice; fog-horn, remonstrative.
‘You don’t have any whisky? So what do the working classes in Lenham drink with their ginger wine?’
He finally leaves; the burgher’s eyes rest on my proffered fiver. I glance over my shoulder. ‘Is he in here every day?’
‘If you wouldn’t park there, please. That space is for our delivery van.’
‘That’s a non sequitur, isn’t it.’
‘No – we used to have one of those but the flipping wheels fell off.’
I sling the viands on the passenger seat. Clutch down, ignition. Two miles on, the church heaves into view. Richard descends from the dismantled window as I lunge through the lychgate. We lean on a sarcophagus, looking up, eating rapidly. He screws his eyes closed, half-opens them again.
‘That glare from the stone. Should have brought sunglasses. Pasties are cold.’
‘I had to hang about for Doctor Who.’
A bemused frown. ‘One of the mullion stones was sawn a bit short. So… that offcut knocking around in the truck.’ He nods towards the road. ‘Make them the same length and we can do it in four instead of three.’
‘But we can’t.’
‘What?’ Wearily recoiling. ‘Come on. You get on the inside with the tape and I’ll offer it up.’
‘I mean, we can’t have a joint in the centre. Surely. Lateral stress. They knew what they were doing.’
‘It’ll be pinned. Anyway this lot are going to slap paint all over it the second we’re gone.’
‘No. We can’t do it.’ Pompously; that it should have to be said. He bridles. The rays of the sun, lowering into the clerestory, strike the walls of the nave behind the gaping lancet. As we wrangle I catch, on its cill, the inconspicuous arrival of a cat, white, black and orange, as though incorrectly stuck. From this station it observes our quandary.
‘That bit of Portland I was talking about,’ Richard begins again, having paced the cemetery perimeter in silent exasperation.
I lift my face out of my hands. ‘What about it.’
‘Extend the middle section with it. Couple of inches. Epoxy resin. Grind the end off nice and square. Then you can have your two joints.’
This is done with adequate craft. The stonework and leaded lights restored, the pointing sponged down, boards swept, ladder stowed, ropes coiled, tools packed, light fading, mortar curing, we prepare to quit the scene.
‘Which way to Lewes?’ He doesn’t waste time with grudges.
‘Through Lamberhurst. Hour and twenty.’
‘Black coffee.’
‘”My skin is white, but my soul is black.”‘
‘Your Roy Orbison is OK but please, enough already with the Steve Marriott.’
To sorrow / I bade good morrow / And thought to leave her far away behind; / But cheerly, cheerly, / She loves me dearly; / …She is so constant and so kind.
The importunity of the unfinished window seems to steady the ship, for the duration. But the heave and sway, the pitching and listing, resumes at nightfall, when I am alone in my lodgings. There is the inaugural adrenaline surge; the helter-skelter descent; the prison bars. I lie face up on the floor. Outside is a sea mist. The steady hooting of an actual fog-horn. A streetlamp illuminates the ceiling; a bare proscenium on which, as if looking down from the flies, I watch the slow dance of a thread of gossamer. This was a sight that fascinated Giacometti. I imagine his contempt were I to tell him that, being depressed, I can’t pick up a pencil. My hands are roughened by stone but my eyes insensate. ‘So what kind of effing artist are you?’ I decide to rise. Death or dishonour. The slug-brain grudgingly sends the signals. Pulling on a jacket I go out and wander some way on foot, before setting on a destination. Somewhere west, close to the beach, I step down to an area window and knock.
We’re here to help. A man of about my age. ‘What’s your name?’ A likeable voice. Not from these parts. A pause; he gently repeats the question.
My speech centres apparently defunct, I am no more able to form words than that inert lump of anorthosite in the Imbrium Basin. Nor can I look back at him. I stare dumbly at the air. The silence continues; his face waits solicitously. I begin to reverse my steps, with some feeble gesture of reassurance. A half-wave of the hand, a half-shake of the head. Kind eyes. I regain the street.
Still the mist. Eventually I enter a thoroughfare frequented by some acquaintances, one of whom – Jeremy – accosts me from the road, at the wheel of his own battered saloon, unaccompanied. He checks the mirror, not wanting to block traffic. He, too, is permanently unsettled; seeking certainty, musing on fresh directions. Yet his diagnoses are unsparingly clear-sighted. He has inspired, in the year or two of my knowing him, my strong regard.
But, taking the present opportunity, he seeks to express his own for me, beaming brightly as I shuffle towards him, stooping and blinking. He wishes to embellish, very eloquently, a routine greeting. He has cherished our conversations and our friendship, and regrets that it is not of longer standing. I am to take good care of myself. I attempt, with a grateful smile, to croak out an answer, almost intelligible. Fortunately he demurs, can’t stop. He bestows his warmest wishes, holds out a hand with an affectionate gaze, and drives on. But I see nothing significant in the encounter. My usual vigilance has failed; each neuron enfettered.
This mad, endless, vicious rodeo. Boxes on wheels, idiosyncratically piloted. Grown men, children’s toys. The acme of imaginative enterprise. Getting in, getting out, getting in. Can we never get out of them for good. Be rewarded for vision instead. Bring back Landaus, Hansoms, horse shit, no problem. Omnibuses. Trains. Or stay where you happen to be. No need to be gadding about, forever at each other’s throats. Hours pass, but this blackness and motionlessness, this being but not-being, has been and will be everlasting. Morning will not come. I will make it so. I lift my hand, send a signal to the engine. The jalopy and I trundle east: Newhaven, Seaford, and on. Not many miles. I might have stuck with Shank’s pony, set an example. On one mouldering side-panel is painted the legend: NO WAR IN THE GULF. On the other it occurs to me to add: THE REST IS SILENCE. This foolishness embarrasses my resolve. The night sky is overcast; no coruscating firmament.
Nineteen centuries and nine-tenths. Why not stop at this, by means of a cliff whose high and bending head looks fearfully into the confined deep. And between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception. I do have whiskey. But, far from facilitating the objective, it makes the wind on my face more exhilarating. It is as though the personage driven here in torment, now thinking twice, is being dragged by another – his twin – towards the edge. His bluff is called. Prone on the beetling brow I grip the angle then try to stand, looking squarely down. The faint sough of the surf. I see nothing. Anger will persuade; deny reflection.
At whom? For what?
No war, inside. Who began it? Engulf the field.
By the way, that’s the end of humour. Light, spaces, sounds. Small things.
A matter of courage. But I am weeping. The danger has passed, even at the point of my setting out. Hitting the road, arriving at the jump, was easy enough: the first act in the upswing, the revival of self-deliberation.
In a Romantic sensibility awakened by relief, I hear not a scream passing through nature but, from the whispering sea, paternal reproof: How about some gratitude?
*
‘Did you ever go along to that place. Gloucester. “Depressives Anonymous,” or something. You said you were thinking of going.’
This is unexpected from Richard, eyes on the road and on the clock.
‘I didn’t know you cared.’ This is undue, but overlooked.
‘If after taking on all these contracts you might be about to top yourself it’s of some small material interest.’
‘I did go. A meeting last Sunday. But everyone was too defeated to get anywhere. I was the youngest by God knows how many years. I… well, I felt sorry for them. The chair, for instance. He just about managed to say: “I’ll take the minutes.” Then he slumped back, chucked his glasses on the table and said; “But what’s the point?” It was beyond them even to schedule the next meeting. The room was airless. Desperate. The lights so dim you could hardly see. It didn’t help, getting together – the same suffering in others. Wish I hadn’t. Couldn’t wait to get the hell away.’
‘You said something about violence. In the faraway past.’
‘Philip Larkin, I think. For myself, I don’t recall any such thing. Not literally. I can’t fathom it.’
‘It sounds as though you’re feeling better, if it’s all right for me to say that.’
‘Of course. Sorry about…’ A conciliatory grimace. Say no more.
The riverbank at Stopham. Two hundredweight of sandstone tilts on the edge of the flatbed. To get a grip. We carry. I’m walking backwards for Christmas. Legs failing. ‘I’ve got to put it down.’ George tosses a skid beneath. We straighten up and breathe. The Arun running south; sun setting behind us. A dam fashioned from scaffolding and tarpaulins affords temporary access to the riverbed. I wander for a moment nearer the water’s edge, towards cables, pumps and engineers, one of whom stares back interrogatively.
‘One of mine,’ George calls from the path. ‘Handy with a chisel.’ An ironical head-roll, for my benefit.
As we pause he runs through a compressed history. The bridge has been here since about Henry the Fifth.
‘It was damaged in the war. Not bombs, though someone found a mine out there last year. Left behind by the Canadians. Troop transport. Constantly crossing. There was buckling in the piers.’
One stone, especially large, has to slide on a plank. George pushing hard overbalances, reclines in the mud. Some hilarity. Richard brings a crowbar.
‘Sitting down on the job. Where’s that going?’
‘The starling. Or what’s it called. Near the middle. Maybe a rope, with rollers underneath. If we can get it just down there – a few yards closer. Just for now.’
“Why not bed it straight in?’
‘I was going to tool the face over first. If they can do without one of the generators for a minute.’ He smiles up. ‘Do you think we could move it? ‘Cause it’s on my sodding leg.’
I feed sand to the cement mixer. Duncan talks to his Filofax, drawing mockery. Conscious of scrutiny nonetheless, knee-deep in water amid the Acro props and smell of mould, George calls testily for a spirit level. I have something to tell him.
‘Er, that’s the stone I cut the wrong way. It’s edge-bedded.’
He knows. ‘Shut up!’ Sotte voce. But Duncan cottons on.
‘Yes, sorry about that. My assistant has two right brains.’
‘Great. And has he handled hydraulic lime before?’
The sky, the trees, the stone, the quietly and steadily deepening Arun, the steep bank with standing figures, here higher, here lower: all seems vertically aligned as in a medieval fresco, under a gradually emboldened gibbous moon. The illusion breaks as someone monitoring the dam begins to yell.
‘She’s going to go. She’s going to go.’
The basin we stand in begins to fill. Water sprays our backs. Tools are flung on to the bank. Wading and scrambling.
As we gather ourselves, George plugs in a site lamp, folds his arms and surveys the works. But it’s time to leave him to it. We jolt away through the forest of Andred, relieved of load.
Richard tests the gears sceptically. ‘Sarah said she and her crowd would be at the White Hart. Or the Star. Might still make it. Are you up for that? Or…’
‘I might not be the life and soul…’
He shrugs. ‘A quick pint wouldn’t hurt, I dare say.’
*
We truck on, traversing the greensands and clays, homing in, at the end of a dreamy hour, of a final stretch of road, to the public telephone hard by the pub, in which Sarah herself is illuminated, arrested, listening, mid-call. Unwelcome news.
Others step softly in and out of the saloon bar. Necks are craned. Just discernibly, beyond the attentive group, through the glass panels, her fingers dab her eyes.
We alight inquiringly. A figure comes forward; her sister, Ruth. ‘Jerry,’ she says, and turns abstractedly away.
I wait. Richard makes his way inside, returns, looks behind, around, then at me.
‘Something to do with Jeremy,’ I say.
Stock-still. ‘It seems they found… him this morning. Beachy Head.’
Low voices cease as Sarah comes away from the booth. Its door eases itself practically closed. Ruth has her arm. Nothing is said.
I think of the wind and sky, the black void, the drop, hours before.
‘What time did it happen.’
Ruth turns back. ‘Sometime in the early hours.’ A slow breath in, and out. ‘It looks like it was planned.’
‘But… him? Of all…’
‘”Travel to the ultimate guru.”‘
‘What?’
‘A note to himself. He drew up a list of options. Some of them very sensible. But that one he didn’t cross out.’ She presses her lips together.
A silence. Leaves fall. ‘The… alternatives?’ someone asks, hesitantly.
She lifts her eyes over our heads, over the trees, tracing the moon’s glimmer, incredulous, arms folded. ‘Mundane.’
‘When did he go up there?’ I ask myself, aloud.
‘But he was so clever, so thoughtful… so… rational.’
Just such a waste… just…’
‘It was… ‘ Sarah puts in, ‘you know… rationalized. Utter conviction. To the last detail. I can’t… I don’t want to…’
‘No,’ I say, my hand over my mouth, looking far down the empty road. ‘But who saw him last?’
‘Hang on… who’s with his mother? Does anyone know?’
Delivered of message, the phone box holds for an instant this circle of still-smooth, large-eyed faces; young votaries, soon to surround a grave. I gaze in, make to haul open the door, then release. Modelled on Soane’s mausoleum, Gothic revival. His mother, too, once would have lifted her small child to thrust, with the base of his tiny palm, at buttons A and B. The wonder of the discovery. That you could trade with the whole world, rain or shine, all from in there. Later, wantonly strong and spry, I leapt and larked on its iron dome. Now I am suddenly, oddly aware of my body’s mass, of the earth’s upward pressure. I hear his voice, see his face; the sun-glow in the choir, the sandstone cleaving the Arun. But the heavens again are buried in cloud; the Downs soundless, dark as Erebus. Someone brushes past me. Supplementary inquiries are made.