comfortable in their company, one must swoop alongside them. As William watches them dashing across the park, the burden of despondency descends on his shoulders once more. He has lost, through lack of use, his own nerve and agility for this sort of banter, this brand of exhibitionism. Could he even run as fast as his friends are running? It’s as if he’s watching his own body fleeing across the park, a younger self, speeding away.
Could he perhaps leap up and follow? No, it’s too late. There’s no catching up now. They are dark, fleet figures on a bright horizon. William slumps back on the bench, and his thoughts, briefly stirred up by Bodley and Ashwell, settle into their former stagnancy.
What grieves him most is how unnecessary his suffering is, given the value of the family assets. If his father would only sell the company …
But you have heard all this before. Your best course is to leave William to himself for ten minutes or so. In that time, while his brain forms a crust of reflective algae, the rest of him will feel the influence of all he’s been plied with this morning: the alley whore’s proposition, the sight of the French girls in Trafalgar Square, Bodley and Ashwell’s talk of brothels, their own teasing courtship of him followed by their desertion, and (just in the last hour or so) the arrival in St James’s Park of a number of beautiful young ladies.
A potent brew, all that. Once sufficiently intoxicated, William will rise from his seat and follow his desires, follow them along the path that leads, ultimately, to Sugar.
FOUR
W aiting for William to stir, there’s no need for you to gaze unblinking into his lap until he does. Instead, why not look at some of the objects of his desire? They’ve come to St James’s Park to be looked at, after all.
If you’ve any love for fashion, this year is not a bad one for you to be here. History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women: sometimes it uses the swan as its model, sometimes, perversely, the turkey. This year, the uncommonly elegant styles of women’s clothing and coiffure which had their inception in the early Seventies have become ubiquitous – at least among those who can afford them. They will endure until William Rackham is an old, old man, by which time he’ll be too tired of beauty to care much about seeing it fade.
The ladies swanning through St James’s Park this sunny November midday will not be required to change much between now and the end of their century. They are suitable for immediate use in the paintings of Tissot, the sensation of the Seventies, but they could still pass muster for Munch twenty years later (though he might wish to make a few adjustments). Only a world war will finally destroy them.
It’s not just the clothes and the hairstyle that define this look. It’s an air, a bearing, an expression of secretive intelligence, of foreign hauteur and enigmatic melancholy. Even in these bright early days of the style, there is something a little eerie about the women gliding dryad-like across these dewy lawns in their autumnal dresses, as if they’re invoking the fin de siècle to come prematurely. The image of the lovely demon, the demi-ghost from beyond the grave, is already being cultivated here – despite the fact that most of these women are daft social butterflies with not one demonic thought in their heads. The haunted aura they radiate is merely the effect of tight corsets. Too constrained to inhale enough oxygen, they’re ethereal only in the sense that they might as well be gasping the ether of Everest.
To be frank, some of these women were more at home in crinolines. Marooned in the centre of those wire cages, their need to be treated as pampered infants was at least clear, whereas their current affectation of la ligne and the Continental confidence that goes with it hints at a sensuality they do not possess.
Morally it’s an odd period, both for the observed and the observer:
Could he perhaps leap up and follow? No, it’s too late. There’s no catching up now. They are dark, fleet figures on a bright horizon. William slumps back on the bench, and his thoughts, briefly stirred up by Bodley and Ashwell, settle into their former stagnancy.
What grieves him most is how unnecessary his suffering is, given the value of the family assets. If his father would only sell the company …
But you have heard all this before. Your best course is to leave William to himself for ten minutes or so. In that time, while his brain forms a crust of reflective algae, the rest of him will feel the influence of all he’s been plied with this morning: the alley whore’s proposition, the sight of the French girls in Trafalgar Square, Bodley and Ashwell’s talk of brothels, their own teasing courtship of him followed by their desertion, and (just in the last hour or so) the arrival in St James’s Park of a number of beautiful young ladies.
A potent brew, all that. Once sufficiently intoxicated, William will rise from his seat and follow his desires, follow them along the path that leads, ultimately, to Sugar.
FOUR
W aiting for William to stir, there’s no need for you to gaze unblinking into his lap until he does. Instead, why not look at some of the objects of his desire? They’ve come to St James’s Park to be looked at, after all.
If you’ve any love for fashion, this year is not a bad one for you to be here. History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women: sometimes it uses the swan as its model, sometimes, perversely, the turkey. This year, the uncommonly elegant styles of women’s clothing and coiffure which had their inception in the early Seventies have become ubiquitous – at least among those who can afford them. They will endure until William Rackham is an old, old man, by which time he’ll be too tired of beauty to care much about seeing it fade.
The ladies swanning through St James’s Park this sunny November midday will not be required to change much between now and the end of their century. They are suitable for immediate use in the paintings of Tissot, the sensation of the Seventies, but they could still pass muster for Munch twenty years later (though he might wish to make a few adjustments). Only a world war will finally destroy them.
It’s not just the clothes and the hairstyle that define this look. It’s an air, a bearing, an expression of secretive intelligence, of foreign hauteur and enigmatic melancholy. Even in these bright early days of the style, there is something a little eerie about the women gliding dryad-like across these dewy lawns in their autumnal dresses, as if they’re invoking the fin de siècle to come prematurely. The image of the lovely demon, the demi-ghost from beyond the grave, is already being cultivated here – despite the fact that most of these women are daft social butterflies with not one demonic thought in their heads. The haunted aura they radiate is merely the effect of tight corsets. Too constrained to inhale enough oxygen, they’re ethereal only in the sense that they might as well be gasping the ether of Everest.
To be frank, some of these women were more at home in crinolines. Marooned in the centre of those wire cages, their need to be treated as pampered infants was at least clear, whereas their current affectation of la ligne and the Continental confidence that goes with it hints at a sensuality they do not possess.
Morally it’s an odd period, both for the observed and the observer:
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