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  ‘And so you see, my dear,’ Arnold had then added with a sharp twinkle in his eye, ‘when the actual wedding night came, and these two old dears, these two old lovey-doveys, were in some posh hotel on the coast; the colonel, or whatever he was, decided that he would reveal his secret to his lady-love. Not by telling her about it, you see; not by having a good talk with her, as he might have done; but simply by stepping out of the bathroom wearing some rather fetching, black, silk lingerie and a few ribbons in his hair.’

  ‘Well,’ Arnold had gone on, ‘you would have thought – wouldn’t you? – that that would have been the end of the affair; of the marriage, I mean. But no! Not a bit of it! Quite the contrary! For the bride threw up her hands in glee; pushed her hubby between the sheets; and said, “Darling, don’t worry. It is all I ever hoped for.”’

  It was mainly for the exchange of gossipy stories such as this that Arnold’s little night-time band would gather: washing them down with a few glasses of wine, or of port; followed by a few munchings of biscuits and cheese: their parties often continuing into the night – sometimes into the early hours. ‘Oh, darling, it’s such fun; we do enjoy ourselves,’ Arnold would say to Jason at times. ‘You really must come down and join us.’ But which Jason never did.

  To those who know Chelsea well – or rather who knew it well, for all this took place some time ago – such gatherings as these will come as no surprise; for in the decade that followed the war (the Second World War, that is) there were a lot of people who entertained on very little. And there have always been a lot of eccentric characters in the area – often ones with a theatrical background; as was the case with Arnold, who claimed that he had at one time been a production-manager in the cinema; and who was always quick to inform people that he knew all the stars of the stage and screen. So offbeat characters belonging to some of the stranger seams of life are simply a part of the area’s tradition. There was even one well-known ‘host’, as people spoke of him, who was said to often receive his visitors in a coffin. Not lying down in it, of course, but sitting upright; his arms waving graciously to and fro as his guests began to arrive; as if he might be Cleopatra in her barge, or, more probably, Queen Elizabeth in her carriage.

  And then there was another character – a musician who played in clubs and bars in the West End; and who, on a certain Sunday in each month, would give what he called his ‘monthly open-house party’ for those who cared to call. However, because he lived on the topmost floor of a building in which there was no lift, he was to be seen perpetually hanging out of a window and throwing down his keys.

  Jason enjoyed all this. The other side of Chelsea, which was the one of business people and diplomats, and officials of various kinds, all of whom entertained in a more elaborate fashion; their tables set with care; their rooms decked out with expensive leaves and flowers; was something he almost despised. For not having been born into, or brought up in, what one might speak of as a traditional, middle-class home (in that his parents were both such individuals and didn’t belong to any one particular group), he was inclined to see that world in terms of caricature; as one of people who seldom expressed towards each other any really genuine feeling or concern; and who seemed to conduct their lives through a series of gestures they all shared; and that had to do with snobberies of various kinds: usually ones connected with class, or simply with money.

  Perhaps to some extent we all do that; and Jason certainly cared a lot about money, in that he was always so very careful with it, and tended to classify the people he met in terms of whether they had much of it or not. Nonetheless, it was his interest in the spirit that really dominated his life; and this was reflected in the few friends he had – almost all of whom were intellectuals of a kind: one being the painter that has been mentioned, Joseph Mallory, who, only a month or so ago, had begun a debate with Jason upon the telephone about what he called the ‘rise and fall of Jackson Pollock’, the American Abstract-Expressionist painter, whose work he had at first admired, but that he now thought rather dull: and he knew a poet too – someone a little younger than himself, who, unfortunately, no longer lived in London; and also a novelist – a woman-friend, with whom he had once had an affair – as well as a few teachers, whose minds were lively, and who, because of their interest in books and paintings, and in spiritual matters in general, came under Arnold’s collective heading of ‘Jason’s arty-tarty friends’.

  II

  ‘Edgar! … can you spare a moment?’

  From a sunlit garden, the voice of Lilian Callow span through one of the tall, open French windows of what had been her father’s house in Hampshire; a sturdy, fine-looking building that she had inherited only a few years ago, but in which she had lived both with her father until he had died (her mother having died when she was very young) and with Edgar Callow, her husband, for what would soon be forty years.

  ‘Did you call, Lilian?’ her husband asked from inside the house, as he appeared to almost stumble from his study into the drawing-room, and as his eyes peered through the thickish lenses of his spectacles to find the distant figure of his wife, who was carrying a bundle of weeds in her right hand and a garden trowel in her left.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Lilian replied. ‘I just wanted to say that I’ve done all the flower-beds. The whole lot of them; so there’ll be no need of weeding for a day or two.’

  ‘Lilian, you work too hard. It could have been left for Gordon to do. What do we pay him for? Or until I got round to doing it myself.’

  ‘Oh, I have to be busy, Edgar. You know that. If a thing needs doing I must do it. Besides, I enjoyed it. See how nice it looks.’

  Glancing with pride at the work she had just completed, Lilian quickly disposed of the trowel and the bundle of weeds, then slipped off the sandals she was wearing to step onto the sunwarmed wood of the polished drawing-room floor.

  ‘Shall we have tea?’ she asked, now feeling the effects of her efforts.

  ‘Tea? Why? What time is it?’

  ‘It is almost five, dear. We’ve both been lost in our two worlds.’

  ‘Oh, well; in that case we should,’ Edgar replied, screwing up his nose and pushing up his spectacles. ‘We shall.’

  As Edgar was saying this, a telephone rang in the background, and its sound was then soon followed by a light tap on the drawing-room door; which, being only partly ajar, was now pushed open further by Betty, as she was both known and called; and who (as she was always so quick to describe herself), was something a lot less than a housekeeper, but something a little more than a maid.

  ‘The telephone, Mrs Callow,’ she said to Lilian, her eyes taking in the state of Edgar Callow’s clothing, and checking to see that no buttons were undone. ‘It’s Mister Jeremy.’

  ‘Jeremy? Really? At this time of day?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Callow.’

  ‘I wonder why?’

  ‘He didn’t say, Mrs Callow.’

  ‘I’ll take it, Betty … And Betty, dear, as it is almost five, I think that we should have tea.’

  ‘Certainly, Mrs Callow. Will it be in? Or will it be outside in the garden?’

  ‘Oh, out, I think, while the weather’s still good. And Betty, dear, you’ve no need to be quite so formal with us, you know. As I’ve said to you so often, neither Mr Callow nor myself would object to your calling us by our Christian names; as we call you by yours.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I could do that, Mrs Callow, much as I always appreciate your suggesting it. It’s too modern. And besides, dignity counts a great deal for me, and calling either of you by your Christian name would constitute a loss of it.’

  ‘Betty! What a way of speaking you have. It’s all those books you read. You almost talk like one at times.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I do, Mrs Callow, but I can’t see the harm there is in that. Books – or the reading of them, rather – is the only education I’ve had.’

  Lilian gave a quick laugh; one light enough not to offend; and Edgar, having looked at Betty with a re
flective eye, made his way towards his study, in order to put away his papers and then to freshen himself for tea.

  As she reached the telephone, which was kept in the hall of the house, and where it could be cold and draughty in winter, but where it was now quite pleasantly cool, Lilian paused, reminding herself how there could so easily be friction between herself and her eldest son. Quite the opposite of Jason, she thought, her ‘second one’, as she always named him; the one she admired so much and with whom she had had such a deep, such an intimate relationship; and whose five books – five novels – were on display in a bookcase in the drawing-room, together with his biography of Andrew Bron, a poet few people had heard of, but which Lilian claimed to have read with interest and insisted she had enjoyed.

  ‘Jeremy, dear!’ Lilian’s voice trembled a little as she spoke into the receiver. ‘What a surprise.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Mother. What on earth am I doing, ringing you at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Well, it is rather unusual, dear. I hope it’s not to give us bad news or something.’

  ‘No, Mother. I was just wanting to know if Jason is in London. I’ve been ringing him all weekend, but can get no reply. I’m going to be in town on business, on Tuesday, and thought that Jason and I might meet.’

  ‘Well, it would be nice for you both, if you could; but I can’t help you, I’m afraid, as we’ve not heard from Jason for quite a while. He was here three weeks ago, as you know, for his birthday; but we’ve not heard from him since then.’

  ‘You mean, he hasn’t rung; hasn’t telephoned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or sent a card even?’

  ‘Oh, a card – yes. But he hasn’t called; hasn’t rung us – no: which is unusual. I’ve just taken it that he’s been busy; writing or something. In fact, we were half thinking of ringing him this evening ourselves.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try again,’ said Jeremy. ‘I just wanted to know that nothing is wrong.’

  ‘Oh, nothing is wrong,’ answered Lilian firmly. ‘We’d have known if there was. Jason doesn’t hide his troubles from us – or not from me, at least. How is Helen, by the way? How are the children?’

  ‘She’s fine. Helen is fine. The children too. Alan has a new girlfriend. They’ve just gone off to France together. And Poppy – well, Poppy is just growing.’

  ‘Oh, what it is to be young,’ sighed Lilian, remembering her own first trips to the Continent. ‘Enjoy it while you can, Jeremy. Old age does not come alone, you know; as Betty is always reminding us.’

  The pleasantries of this family exchange continued for a while longer, before Lilian returned to the garden, and to where her husband, whose knotted hand had been briskly stirring the teapot, was now pouring out the tea. She told him about Jeremy’s various questions regarding Jason; said she might try to ring Jason in an hour or two; expressed her certainty that if something was or had been amiss then she – they – would have heard of it; and that she would have known by instinct as well; and, although tired by her work in the garden that day, felt proud of what she had done, and therefore pleased and glad to have done it.

  It must have been some two weeks before this sunny, August day, and therefore a week after his birthday, and after he had been to visit his parents, that Jason met his painter-friend, Joseph Mallory, in the bar of a public house: a local one in Chelsea where they would often meet for a drink, and not a stone’s throw from Sloane Square.

  As usual, Joseph was dressed scruffily; wearing a pair of paint-splashed trousers and a rather heavy seaman’s sweater – not at all suitable for the warm weather; and Jason quite neatly, but ‘artily’, to use one of Arnold’s favourite expressions, in a pair of dark-green corduroy slacks and a crumpled, purple-coloured sports shirt, together with a tie that almost matched. And it was on this occasion that they took up the discussion that had been begun by Joseph on the telephone concerning the painter, Jackson Pollock; whose work, as anyone knows, who knows something about modern art, was part of what had been called the American Abstract-Expressionist movement; and an exhibition of whose large, vigorous canvases had been on show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and had become the talk of the town.

  Both Joseph and Jason had been to see the exhibition, and Joseph was full of it. He knew that Jason was a little blind to the visual arts, and that although painting interested him, and sculpture too, he responded to both more through his intellect than through his body, as it were – meaning in a haptic sense; which, as far as the visual arts are concerned, is the most direct and immediate form of appreciation. But he knew too that Jason was a good listener and liked to be stimulated by his talk; and there was little that he – meaning Joseph – enjoyed more than having Jason as an audience; and as a kind of testing-ground for his ideas.

  Joseph always had a tendency to set himself against things that he felt to be ‘of the moment’, or that he sensed were about to become fashionable, so his theme that evening was that he had ‘seen through Pollock’, as he put it; something he had already said to Jason on the telephone; and by which he meant that his admiration for this artist, which, only a week or two ago had been so intense – and, indeed, so very positive – had undergone a sudden change.

  The argument ‘for’ Pollock’s work, which was the one used at the time (and that might still be used for it today) was that the seemingly random dribbles of paint that cross and re-cross the canvases, together with the odd smear or the occasional brushstroke, were a means used by the artist for trapping the interior world of the unconscious; which everyone seemed to agree upon as having become an important thing to do; since, due to the experiences of the war, perhaps, it seemed to be a world that people felt a strong need to be in touch with just then, by different means and methods: through the use of the Ouija board, for example; or of tarot cards; or (quite a feature of that moment) the consulting of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which had been published in a translation by Richard Wilhelm and with an Introduction by Jung.

  ‘You can say what you like,’ Joseph had argued, ‘but as I see it, Pollock’s stuff is nothing but wallpaper. Surface-stuff … They’ (he was here meaning the critics and writers on art) ‘are always speaking about it’ (meaning, the Abstract-Expressionist movement in general) ‘as being a kind of natural progression – or a logical one, rather; that is the word they use – from Monet’s “Water Lily” paintings. Get rid of the water lilies, they all argue; get rid of the depiction, the representation, and the next thing’s got to be abstract art. Well, that’s all balls. It’s all nonsense. Mondrian – you know Mondrian’s work, don’t you, Jason? – the Dutchman – he’s already followed that line, from representational to abstract art: and where did it get him? No fucking where: up a blind alley … I mean, you can’t get rid of the figure – can you? Not if you want rich, deep imagery. You’ve got to have the complexity of the body. And I tell you – in time it’ll be back: the figure’ll be in vogue again.’

  ‘But what about landscape painting?’ Jason then asked pointedly. ‘There aren’t figures in that, Joe – or only a few at times – and landscape painting can be great, can’t it? Be deep?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course it can,’ Joseph answered a little tetchily, not liking to be caught out by Jason, or to be checked in his flow of expression. ‘Turner’s one of the greatest painters that ever lived. But he’s not abstract, Jason; he’s figurative too, in the sense that he uses the imagery of the world around him; how he sees it, that is; or knows it, might be a better way of putting it. And that’s why you can’t get rid of depiction, Jason – of representation. You’ve got to have something to be abstract about, it seems to me.’

  ‘So don’t you think this new stuff will last? This American painting, for example?’

  ‘Oh, it will last – for a while at least. The money’s already been poured into it. Like the work of the Pre-Raphaelites: that’s lasted: that’s lingered on as a kind of curiosity. But it’s not really deep, is it? I tell
you, Jason, I’ve seen through this one. It’s too possessed by pattern-making. There’s no real drawing in it. It does allow for accident – I’ll grant it that – which is no bad thing; but it doesn’t work with it very much; doesn’t have a real dialogue with it.’

  ‘But that’s the point of it!’ Jason answered, his voice suddenly loud, and at the same time thumping the table with his fist and rising swiftly to his feet. ‘The point, Joe’, he repeated, and with a sudden flare of anger in his eye, which made Joseph turn quickly to the other customers in the bar, as if to apologise for his friend’s behaviour.

  ‘Listen, Joe!’ Jason went on, almost shouting, ‘I’ve read somewhere – officially, I mean: in the papers, I mean, that these – these dribbles, or whatever you call them: these – these scrawls of paint on Pollock’s canvases, are meant to be a direct – an immediate representation of the inner state of things; and surely there’s got to be something in that. There has to be!’

  ‘Bollocks, Jason,’ said Joseph, lowering his voice a little, and in the hope that Jason might do the same. ‘Inner things,’ he continued, almost in a whisper, and as if he might be about to impart a secret, ‘inner things, Jason – inner states – are deep, not shallow. Leonardo’s cartoon – of the Virgin and St Anne, I mean; take that, for example. Those two bloody women: The Virgin and her mother; all fused into one: the rhythms blending; intertwining; like some great story. There’s even a touch of Henry Moore in that, I think. And that’s what I call abstract art. Not this paint-pot stuff … I tell you, it’s a blind alley: more craft than art. If you get too logical in art, Jason – in painting; in the sense of this leading to that, then you’re up the creek, it seems to me. Artists need to follow no rules, Jason: to be devious; and I don’t think that much of Monet’s bloody water-lilies, in any case. I’d sooner have a small canvas by Cézanne, than one of those great sprawling canvases by Monet. There’s depth there, all right. There’s thought there – in Cézanne.’