straight up.'
'So what are you doing out here?'
He asked it with little curiosity, but James replied: 'Musing on the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.'
'I think Rupert wants you.'
'I'm coming now,' and he mounted, painfully as an old man, to the disorder, the warmth, the exotic overcrowded muddle that was now his sitting-room.
62
8
It was nine o'clock and on the top floor of a terraced house off Westbourne Grove Claudia Etienne lay in bed with her lover.
She said: 'I wonder why one always feels randy after a funeral. The potent conjunction of death and sex, I suppose. Did you know that Victorian prostitutes used to service their clients in graveyards on the flat tops of the tombs?'
'Hard, cold and sinister. I hope they got piles. It wouldn't turn me on. I'd keep thinking of the rotting body underneath and all those bloated worms creeping in and out of the orifices. Darling, what extraordinary facts you do know. Being with you is an education.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I know it is.' She was wondering whether he, like her, had more than historical facts in mind. 'Being with you', he had said, not 'loving you'.
He turned towards her, propping his head on his hand. 'Was the funeral ghastly?'
'It managed to be tedious and grim at the same time, canned music, a coffin which looked as if it had been recycled, a liturgy revised to offend no one, including God, and a parson who did his best to give the impression that we were engaged in something that had meaning.'
He said: 'When my turn comes I'd like to be burnt on a funeral
pyre by the sea like Keats.'
'Shelley.'
'That poet, whoever he was. A hot windy night, no coffin, lots of booze and all one's mates swimming naked then dancing round the fire, all being happily warmed by me. And the ashes could be washed away by the next tide. Do you think if I left instructions in my will someone would arrange it?'
'I shouldn't rely on it. You'll probably end up at Golders Green like the rest of us.'
His bedroom was small and the floor space almost entirely occupied by a five-foot wide Victorian bed in ornamental brass, the high bedposts crowned with knobs. From these Declan had suspended a
63
Victorian patchwork quilt, in part badly tattered. It hung above them as they made love, lit by the bedside lamp, a rich patterned canopy of gleaming silk and satin. Some shreds of the silk hung down and she had an impulse now to pick at them. The scraps were, she saw, lined with old letters, the black spider-marks of the long-dead hand plainly visible. A family's history, a family's troubles and triumphs pressed down upon them.
His kingdom, and it seemed to her a kingdom, lay beneath them. The shop, the whole property, was owned by Mr Simon - she had never learned his forename - and he rented the top two floors to Declan at a ridiculous sum and paid him with equal frugality for managing the shop. He himself was always there in his black skull-cap to greet favoured customers, sitting at a Dickensian desk just inside the door, but otherwise he took little part in buying and selling although he controlled the flow of cash. The front of the house was arranged under his personal supervision, the pick of the furniture, pictures and artefacts displayed to advantage. It was the back of the ground floor which Declan had made his domain. It was a long conservatory of strengthened glass with at each end two palm-trees, the slender trunks of iron, and the fronds, which trembled as the hand brushed against them, sheets of tin painted a bright green. This touch of Mediterranean sun contrasted with the conservatory's faintly ecclesiastical air. Some of the original lower panes of glass had been replaced by oddly shaped pieces of stained glass from demolished churches; a jigsaw of yellow-haired angels and haloed saints, lugubrious apostles, fragments of a nativity scene or of the last supper, domestic vignettes of hands pouring wine into pitchers or lifting loaves of bread. Placed in happy disorder on a
'So what are you doing out here?'
He asked it with little curiosity, but James replied: 'Musing on the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.'
'I think Rupert wants you.'
'I'm coming now,' and he mounted, painfully as an old man, to the disorder, the warmth, the exotic overcrowded muddle that was now his sitting-room.
62
8
It was nine o'clock and on the top floor of a terraced house off Westbourne Grove Claudia Etienne lay in bed with her lover.
She said: 'I wonder why one always feels randy after a funeral. The potent conjunction of death and sex, I suppose. Did you know that Victorian prostitutes used to service their clients in graveyards on the flat tops of the tombs?'
'Hard, cold and sinister. I hope they got piles. It wouldn't turn me on. I'd keep thinking of the rotting body underneath and all those bloated worms creeping in and out of the orifices. Darling, what extraordinary facts you do know. Being with you is an education.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I know it is.' She was wondering whether he, like her, had more than historical facts in mind. 'Being with you', he had said, not 'loving you'.
He turned towards her, propping his head on his hand. 'Was the funeral ghastly?'
'It managed to be tedious and grim at the same time, canned music, a coffin which looked as if it had been recycled, a liturgy revised to offend no one, including God, and a parson who did his best to give the impression that we were engaged in something that had meaning.'
He said: 'When my turn comes I'd like to be burnt on a funeral
pyre by the sea like Keats.'
'Shelley.'
'That poet, whoever he was. A hot windy night, no coffin, lots of booze and all one's mates swimming naked then dancing round the fire, all being happily warmed by me. And the ashes could be washed away by the next tide. Do you think if I left instructions in my will someone would arrange it?'
'I shouldn't rely on it. You'll probably end up at Golders Green like the rest of us.'
His bedroom was small and the floor space almost entirely occupied by a five-foot wide Victorian bed in ornamental brass, the high bedposts crowned with knobs. From these Declan had suspended a
63
Victorian patchwork quilt, in part badly tattered. It hung above them as they made love, lit by the bedside lamp, a rich patterned canopy of gleaming silk and satin. Some shreds of the silk hung down and she had an impulse now to pick at them. The scraps were, she saw, lined with old letters, the black spider-marks of the long-dead hand plainly visible. A family's history, a family's troubles and triumphs pressed down upon them.
His kingdom, and it seemed to her a kingdom, lay beneath them. The shop, the whole property, was owned by Mr Simon - she had never learned his forename - and he rented the top two floors to Declan at a ridiculous sum and paid him with equal frugality for managing the shop. He himself was always there in his black skull-cap to greet favoured customers, sitting at a Dickensian desk just inside the door, but otherwise he took little part in buying and selling although he controlled the flow of cash. The front of the house was arranged under his personal supervision, the pick of the furniture, pictures and artefacts displayed to advantage. It was the back of the ground floor which Declan had made his domain. It was a long conservatory of strengthened glass with at each end two palm-trees, the slender trunks of iron, and the fronds, which trembled as the hand brushed against them, sheets of tin painted a bright green. This touch of Mediterranean sun contrasted with the conservatory's faintly ecclesiastical air. Some of the original lower panes of glass had been replaced by oddly shaped pieces of stained glass from demolished churches; a jigsaw of yellow-haired angels and haloed saints, lugubrious apostles, fragments of a nativity scene or of the last supper, domestic vignettes of hands pouring wine into pitchers or lifting loaves of bread. Placed in happy disorder on a
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