A memory from the first half of life when a friend and I ran a stone carving and restoration business. Some names have been changed.
Brighton: a cold morning in one’s prime. Cursing in the street, my partner would bid me rise. But sleep has come grudgingly; I’m presently detained in a landscape remote in time. Searching for someone in a dusky wood of tall trees I behold the ruined facade of a Reformation manor house. Perhaps we might tender for repairs to the limestone ashlar. A cry goes up, an admonition, as though from King Hamlet beneath the stage; then a gallet strikes the pane. Finally, hastily astir as the day is steadily sliced away, I’m booted and gloved, slamming the door, breathing raw air, back on the job. Squinting into the headwind, we strike out towards the west pier. Amidst these impressions the dumbshow of the dream is faintly reprised, a loath-to-depart, the end of the reel. My transposition isn’t quite complete. But soon we’re bearing down on our company truck, a superannuated Bedford from the seventies, languishing on the front, where I chose to leave it last night. I haul myself in and turn the key. The sea’s surface is cyan, gulls glide, the motor is silent.
‘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.
‘What battery.’ Levelly. A window flashes open overhead: Embassy Court.
I thump the console, slump back and breathe out. 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…’
‘Yeah. I mean, no. 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.
The Bedford 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. I’m suddenly overturned, as it seems, by a violent swell, or the inrush of a decuman wave from an infinite emptiness, of despair, or grief, or dread, of no apparent cause, seizing up the gears of thought and extinguishing all volition. It is as though time slows almost to a halt and the wave thickens; as if the mass of the South Downs from the Devil’s Dyke to the sea were levigated into a vast bed of grout, an inexorable, lurching, slipping inundation that crams down all hope. All at once I might be a petrified mass on the lifeless moon, far below this blue world waxing and waning on the edge of non-existence. It is a familiar feeling and I know it can’t be repulsed, yet how and why it debilitates me is impossible to understand.
Autumn light and the smell of oil and vinyl, a recaptured ‘context of sensations,’ summon a memory from a quarter century ago. Can’t buy me love is being played on the Light Programme. Finding its tailgate open I inquisitively trespass in the new family car, clamber over the seats, slide down before the controls. I grasp the wheel’s banjo spokes and imagine myself Fireballing through the galaxy. But then, with the same suddenness and force, the entire universe becomes de-sensualized, abstract and unrealizable. It is as though I am pierced, tormented and numbed by some disastrous, irredeemable loss, long before I have lost anything in fact. My father looms in the windscreen, perplexed by my abrupt abjectness of mien. The memory arises, perhaps, because it was the first time I sensed in this aberration my sequestration from the seemingly unoccluded contentment of a ‘normal’ life.
It dissipates as Phil descends, eyes rolling, to revive the stranded relic; like a bat out of hell he then leads the way to his workshop, from which, just in time, I reach our own 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.’ Hark, tyres on the dirt road. A supercilious entrance: I capture the castle. As if sherry expected. It’s cold in here. She casts back a silk scarf, detaches it from the brim of a preposterous hat, checks her shoes. Her bearded acolyte pauses 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 they’ll be in and finished before the cold weather, no question.’
‘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 the actor 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 recognizing, like everyone else, his voice; fog-horn, remonstrative.
‘You don’t have any whisky? So what do the working classes in Lenham take with their ginger wine?’
Eventually he 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 – it seems to work – 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 brow 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 emergency 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 resolve to get up. 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 listen. 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 kind eyes wait 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. I regain the street.
Still the mist. After about a mile, heading slowly back east, I’m accosted by Jeremy, at the wheel of his own battered saloon, halted in the road. 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 our knowing each other, 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 me to know how much he has enjoyed our conversations and cherished 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 intelligibly. 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. The acme of human enterprise. Getting in, getting out, getting in. Can we not 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. Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception. I do have whiskey (no ginger wine) for furtherance of the aim. It only makes the wind on my face more exhilarating. My bluff is being called. It is as if one personage, possibly thinking twice, is dragged towards the edge by an invisible other. Prone on the beetling brow I grip the angle then slowly stand, looking squarely down. That’s vertigo, though. A seismic shock centred in the viscera. I hear the surf’s faint sough, too distant and dark to see.
An angry run-up, I think. Last kick against the pricks. Furious acceleration, arc clear of the face. So these damnable large feet finally come into their own. But no, that’s not what will happen. It isn’t a cartoon cliff. All the unknown elements. I’ve done no research. I lack conviction, therefore courage. It’s anger that brings me here. At whom, for what? I’m tired of the questions. Anger will persuade; deny reflection. No war, inside. Who began it? But it won’t end, ever, so we’ll engulf the field.
Courage would mean, of course, the end of light, spaces, sounds. Of delight in small things, the hidden things. But not so small or hidden. It’s that the trash took up all the room. In six seconds there’ll be more trash, down there. This lump of scrap, flung before some unfortunate finder. Mysteriously impaired, ex works. But the flinging won’t improve it, by the way. Since death is also the end of learning, my place is regrettably fixed. I’ll rest unequally and ignobly among those of my betters who for more interesting reasons of their own had recourse to self-murder.
‘Threatened with annihilation, life gathers its force, becomes conscious of itself…’ †
Does it? That’s not how it appears. I won’t have it that the going hence must be endured. In any case, what a way for Edgar to speak to his father. But I’ve turned inland. I’m clumping through windswept grass. I’ll cravenly live on, it seems.
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 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. Two of us get a grip, swing it off and carry. I’m walking backwards for Christmas. Legs failing. ‘I’ve got to put it down.’ George tosses a skid beneath; we straighten up with groans of relief. 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. Allegedly.’
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 transmission 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, on a final stretch of road, to the public telephone box 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 long 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, gazing far down the empty road. ‘But who saw him last?’
‘Hang on… who’s with his mother? Does anyone know?’
Heads turn back towards the phone box, delivered of message, whose pale lamp holds this circle of faces, of young votaries. Designed by Gilbert Scott, after Soane’s mausoleum. As a child I would thrust, with the heels of small hands, at buttons A and B. The wonder of it: that you could trade with the world, rain or shine, all from in there. Later, wantonly strong and spry, I would leap and lark on the iron dome. But the lesson that follows my decision, this very day, to live and learn, now overpowers me totally. An enhanced intensity in everything seems to pull it more tightly to the earth. I feel transfixed, rooted like a tree by that giddy precipice, crook-backed under sea gales, forever contemplating the ground. I make to haul open the door, then release. I see, again, the sun-glow in the choir; I hear the sandstone cleaving the Arun. I see his figure, meet his eyes, hear his voice. I see myself letting him go. I break away from the bereft gathering. Light from the coast is reflected in low cloud, but the surrounding, soundless Downs are dark as Erebus. Someone brushes past me. Supplementary inquiries are made.
† Serge Dubrouvsky, The Ethics of Albert Camus
Other borrowings: from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Ling Lear), Dickens (Hard Times), Keats (Endymion), Eliot (The Dry Salvages).