Amaryllis Night and Day Read online

  To Liz Calder

  ‘Once I, Chuang Chou, dreamed that I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly … I did not know that I was Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and there I was, visibly Chou. I do not know whether it was Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that it was Chou.’

  ‘Chuang-tzu’, Encyclopaedia

  Britannica Online

  ‘There is a balm in Gilead

  To make the wounded whole;

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To heal a sin-sick soul.’

  Afro-American spiritual

  ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.’

  Nelson Algren,

  A Walk on the Wild Side

  Contents

  1 The First Time

  2 Empty Spaces

  3 The Second Time

  4 Nameless Here

  5 New and Strange

  6 The Brass Hotel

  7 Venice?

  8 Old Woman as Black Cat

  9 Everybody has One

  10 On Buses

  11 How Clever of God

  12 Cliffs and Edges

  13 Nice One

  14 Memory’s Arrow

  15 From Here on out to Where?

  16 Listing

  17 Late last Night

  18 Walking Spanish

  19 Memories of Yew

  20 The Dark Road

  21 Bird-Women

  22 The Essential Amaryllis

  23 To Maine or Massachusetts

  24 The Borgo Pass

  25 Bowl of Cherries

  26 Unnatural Practices

  27 The Beckoning Other

  28 What Now?

  29 Looking at Shapes

  30 Souvenir

  31 A Seaport

  32 The Commedia Dell’arte

  33 When I Remember

  34 Absent Friends

  35 The Wood-Daemon

  36 Musical Interlude

  37 It Happens

  38 Finsey-Obay

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  The First Time

  The first time I saw her was in a dream, the colours were intense; the air was full of vibrations; everything seemed magnified and slowed down.

  The street lamps were lit but the sky was still light. She was waiting at a bus stop. A sign said BALSAMIC although there was nothing vinegary about the place, no friars and no Gilead in sight. There were nondescript buildings in warm colours, perhaps leaning a bit, perhaps painted on canvas. She was waiting for the bus; there were obscure figures queuing behind her.

  At first she had her back to me, then she turned as I drew near. She had long straw-coloured hair, blue eyes. She was very thin and very pale; her face was fine-drawn and haggard. She was wearing a white T-shirt with music staves and notes on the front of it, faded jeans, white plimsolls. She looked at me and clenched her fist like a tennis player who’s just scored a difficult point at Wimbledon. ‘Yes!’ she shaped with her mouth, didn’t say it out loud.

  A bus was coming. No number on it, only the destination: FINSEY-OBAY. Not a place I’d heard of. The bus was a tall and delicate thing of bamboo and rice paper, sheets of yellow, orange, and pink pasted together and candlelit from within like a Japanese lantern. It was much bigger than a doubledecker, towering so high above me that even when I tilted my head back I couldn’t see the top of it.

  Still with her eyes on me, she beckoned to me to follow as she boarded the bus. A thrill of terror ran up through me from my feet; I stepped back and woke up, cursing my cowardice. I tried to get back into the dream but I couldn’t, and I was left with a sense of loss that stayed with me. I searched in my A to Z for anything Balsamic but there was nothing.

  2

  Empty Spaces

  ‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery. ‘His palette is muted, his compositions unsettling. The figures in his pictures seem about to depart, and there are odd empty spaces that make the viewer wonder who or what has gone and who or what is coming.’

  But that’s life, isn’t it? And those of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write books, or compose music. There are many talented people who never will become painters, writers, or composers; the talent is in them but not the empty spaces where art happens.

  3

  The Second Time

  The dream stayed with me so strongly that I could play it back like a videotape: the bus stop in the summer dusk, the street lamps lit against a sky still light – that time of day that always catches at my heart.

  There was the sign that said BALSAMIC; the letters were sharp and clear; they riffled like rail departures but the name stayed the same. There were those shaky-looking buildings and the bus stop and there she waited, the thin woman with the straw-coloured hair, blue eyes, and pale face, unknown but seeming to look at me round the edges of my memory. Sleeping or waking, I’d never seen her before.

  Again and again she gestured with her clenched fist and said, ‘Yes!’ silently. She wanted me to follow her. Why? Here came the bus: FINSEY-OBAY, yellow, pink, and orange rice paper and bamboo lit from within like a Japanese lantern. Such a light against that not-yet-dark sky! Again she looked at me as she boarded the bus and I felt that thrill of terror as I stepped back. And again the sense of loss. What did she want? How could I find her again?

  She was gone; I was left behind in the present moment which is not a simple finite thing measured by the clock; it’s a palimpsest of all the present moments before it, their images, music, words and whispers rising up through the layered years from the oldest present moment to the newest; and in those moments live, remembered or forgotten, sleeps and wakings and dreams.

  I’m what is called a figurative painter; that is to say, I can draw, and I paint recognisable things: people; monsters; midnights; manhole covers; pillar boxes, whatever. The only world we know is the picture-show the cerebral cortex puts together from sensory data. Whether there’s anything else nobody can say. Vermeer listened to the ticking of the world and painted a series of magically arrested moments that argue reality. Still, if reality had a stage door I’d hang around there to see what comes out after the show.

  As preoccupied as I was with the dream woman, my commitments in the waking world still required my attention. I teach Images and Ideas at the Royal College of Art on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tomorrow was a working day and I needed some new material. Sometimes unknown images offer hints of themselves; glimmers of things half-seen, almost remembered, come into my mind so that I go looking for them without being certain of what I’m after. I hadn’t been to the Science Museum for a long time so I thought I might have a wander round there later. Mrs Quinn comes in to clean on Monday afternoons so it’s a good time to be out of the house.

  In the morning I put in some time on a painting I’d begun a couple of weeks ago, The Beckoning Fair One, a title borrowed from an Oliver Onions story. The cloaked woman in the painting appeared seven times: as the foreground figure she was facing front; receding from the viewer she turned in overlapping successive images until she was seen from the back at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, her fair hair streaming in the wind. Whenever I looked at that painting there ran through me the thrill of terror I had felt in the dream, as if I too were at the edge of that cliff, about to step off. The images in my pictures tend to be uncomfortable ones. I tend to be uncomfortable myself.

  Her face was ghostly and unfinished but I was surprised by how much she reminded me of the woman in the dre
am. I always tone my canvases before I start, using a thin turpentine wash of colour. Expecting things to go fairly cool, I’d done a warm undertone to work against, a mixture of cadmium yellow deep and cadmium orange. As the picture developed, however, I found it moving away from cool, so that I was letting the undertone show through and harmonising warms with warms. I like it when a painting begins to find out who it is and starts to go its own way. In the cool and exacting north light from the windows and skylight the picture was becoming its present moment.

  After lunch, with my head still feeling a little strange from last night’s dream and the morning’s work, I went to Fulham Broadway tube station. The aeroplane-hangar effect of that place holds daylight and darkness in different ways at different times and varies its voices and silences and echoes similarly, although the rails always cry, Wheats-yew! Wheats-yew! as the trains approach. Today the hangar seemed full of waiting, holding its breath to see what would happen next. Beyond the hangar arch the great brass gates of the sunlight stood open. People on the eastbound platform leaned against pillars, sat on benches or stood singly and in groups. They read books and newspapers. They ate and drank and threw rubbish on the floor. They spoke into telephones or murmured to one another. They looked across the tracks to the westbound platform where other people leaned, sat, stood, read, ate, drank, threw rubbish, spoke, murmured, and looked back at them. Pigeons plodded here and there. We too, they mumbled.

  Wheats-yew! Wheats-yew! cried the rails. The tunnel opened its mouth, lights appeared. Bigger, bigger, bigger grew the train. TOWER HILL, shouted the front of it. You! hissed the train. It opened its doors and swallowed me up with other eastbound souls. Inside the carriages the eastbound faces hid whoever was behind them. The train rattled and rumbled, it shook and swayed out of daylight into darkness muttering warnings and prophecies and crooning to itself like an old mother or an ancient sea. In the darkness the present lost its hold and the past, stirring in its sleep, turned its face to me and whispered a name.

  4

  Nameless Here

  ‘Lenore,’ I said on a long-ago day, ‘how does it feel to walk around in a name out of Edgar Allan Poe?’

  ‘Nameless here for evermore,’ she said. ‘Names are pretty useless, really. If you say the name of anything ten or twenty times it scatters and falls away and the thing that’s named stands there all naked and unknowable. Sometimes it comes to me that nothing can be known, nothing at all. Black is the colour, silence is the music, Spanish is the way to walk.’ She liked to be baffling, or at least gnostic, whenever possible. Whether she actually walked Spanish I couldn’t say, but her walk was well worth seeing from the rear.

  ‘Your main attraction,’ she said to me, ‘is that you’re going to make me unhappy.’

  ‘Why is that an attraction?’ I said.

  ‘We haven’t made love yet, but when we do I know that each time I feel you in me I’ll feel the time when you leave me. It’s something to look forward to.’

  ‘Is it something you want to look forward to?’

  ‘Yes. Life is mainly a series of disappointments. People tell lies and for ever usually lasts only a month or so and nothing turns out as promised. So when I can depend on a thing ending as I expect it to that’s a thrill for me, it’s a solid satisfaction, it’s a treat.’

  ‘You must be a very unhappy person, Lenore.’

  ‘Well, I’ve tried being happy and it doesn’t work. Don’t you want to kiss me and make me feel better?’

  5

  New and Strange

  At South Kensington I rose from the depths, escalated to the upper world, passed through the arcade and the queue at the 14 bus stop, crossed between the cars and walked up Exhibition Road where soft ice-cream and hot dogs sweltered and coachloads of emptiness waited for their children to return. The sunlight, crazed with detail, explored every wrinkle, whisker, pore and pimple of tourists consuming Coca-Cola, mineral water, coffee, tea, hot dogs, soft ice-cream, exhaust fumes, and culture.

  The sunlight explored me as well as my footsteps joined those of generations of children, mums, dads, teachers and others all the way back to the heavy tread of Roman legions marching with their standards and centurions up Exhibition Road to the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History, and the Science Museum thirsting for dinosaurs, volcanoes, Indian bronzes, William Morris, and steam locomotives. Not only was I prepared to have empty spaces in me filled with wonders, I was vaguely excited and expectant, as if the sluggish air were alive with possibilities.

  Bannered and mighty with knowledge, the Science Museum loomed. Grateful for the relief, I stepped into the coolness. In the museum shop a young male sales assistant stood among marvels and schoolgirls and again and again threw a tiny aeroplane that returned to his hand every time. Through the turnstiles I passed and found my way to Martha Fleming’s installation, Atomism and Animism. Borrowing from various of the museum’s collections she had arranged objects in new and provocative combinations supported by her texts.

  Guided by a brochure I passed from one part of the exhibition to another, I shook my head over the model of a slave ship placed next to one of the Mayflower; I had long thoughts about Lapointe’s pastel box, each stick of colour labelled with a word perhaps from dreams; I pondered deeply the metaphysical implications of Joshua Reynolds’s camera obscura; I was entranced by the motionless galloping horses on the disc of Muybridge’s zoopraxinoscope, imagining the disc at midnight beginning to move, then spinning faster and faster as the many horses of stillness became one midnight galloper circling with its speechless rider through the hours of darkness.

  There was a beautiful sixteen-inch ivory model of a nude woman, supine, lying as if exhausted by love. Her body was open; some of her organs remained inside the cavity and some lay near her. There was something more than medical about the model, as if a team of little ivory anatomists and philosophers had determined to solve the mystery of the female once and for all; they opened her up, they reached into her and took out various parts, they said, ‘Aha!’ and ‘Oho!’ and nodded their heads but the mystery remained. It was evident that this had been understood by the carver. Might it have been a woman? I imagined a smile on her face as she worked.

  I was from time to time overwhelmed by waves of schoolchildren and tour groups; overlappings of voices, echoes, and echoing silences moved with me as I progressed from floor to floor into and out of centuries, cultures, and continents until eventually I found myself, silent among the voices and footsteps, standing in front of a display case full of Klein bottles in a variety of shapes, a glittering array of ins and outs beyond my comprehension. As I stood there I had a sensation of wearisome reiteration and the idea of something continually passing through itself.

  This feeling came of course from the Klein bottles, which I’d looked up at various times on the Internet. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a Klein bottle thus:

  Topological space, named for the German mathematician Felix Klein, obtained by identifying two ends of a cylindrical surface in the direction opposite that necessary to obtain a torus. The surface is not constructible in three-dimensional Euclidean space but has interesting properties, such as being one-sided, like the Möbius strip (q.v.); being closed, yet having no ‘inside’ like a torus or a sphere, and resulting in two Möbius strips if properly cut in two.

  I didn’t understand that definition myself. Klein bottles were a mystery to me and I like mysteries, but this one seemed to have a metaphor lurking in it and I didn’t like that. If those bottles had something to tell me, let them come right out with it, was how I felt about it.

  There are lots of websites on the Internet devoted to Klein-bottling, with all kinds of graphics and animations. Here’s an illustration from one of them:

  © Davide Cervone

  ‘The Klein bottle cannot be embedded in three-space, but it can be immersed there,’ it says at that site. I love that. Another site says, ‘Any Klein bottle in three-dimensional space must pass through itself somewher
e.’ Great.

  The fact that a Klein bottle ‘is not constructible in three-dimensional Euclidean space’ hasn’t stopped people from having a go at it. The many variations on the Klein-bottle theme in the case had been made by a glass-blower named Alan Bennett. I tried to imagine him getting his mouth around those involutions and I couldn’t. I started to read the card in the display:

  Series of Glass Klein Bottles by Alan Bennett

  These Klein bottles were made for the Museum by Alan Bennett during 1996. Bennett was interested in the relation between the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip, a one-sided surface featured in case N17. He tried to construct Klein bottles which could be cut to form Möbius strips with more than one twist. He found that simply coiling the inlet tube produced Möbius strips with the corresponding number of twists when the bottle was cut, and that he could cut Klein bottles along certain lines to produce Möbius strips with large numbers of twists. Surprisingly, he found he could produce a single Möbius strip from a Klein bottle.

  Following this were descriptions of these twenty-nine bottles that were shamelessly flaunting their metaphysical intestines for anyone who cared to look. I needed not to see them for a bit so I turned my back but I felt their presence like a box of live cobras behind me.

  When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of those Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.