The Museum at the End of the World Read online

  “I turned,” said Jimbo, “to answer a question while holding the roaring-thing and flame inadvertently played upon him.”

  Rob thought this deadpan explanation verged deliciously on dumb insolence.

  All authority, said Jimbo, is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

  Mr. Fontane, Rob’s English teacher that year, was widely believed to be shellshocked; he wore a toupee and tortoiseshell glasses and sometimes forgot to remove his bicycle clips. One memorable morning he had jammed his foot into the metal wastepaper basket and stumped up and down the front of the classroom clanging and clanking in the silence and growling through clenched teeth and distorted jaw, Well, sir! Well?

  He conducted daily exercises in dictation, speaking slowly and distinctly to the window pane, his breath fogging it; enunciating: comma, colon, blah blah, semi-colon, blah, blah, exclamation mark, paragraph, period. After the passage of dictation was concluded, the boys exchanged papers and compared the copies in front of them with the distributed copies of the mimeographed text. The sum of mistakes was then calculated: minus 1 for errors in punctuation, minus 2 for omissions, minus 3 for errors in spelling. This figure was subtracted from 20 and the total circled beneath the pupil’s name and the papers again traded. The papers were then handed forward until they all reached the boys in the front desks and were then all gathered up by Mr. Fontane and secured under a spring clip in an immense binder. This activity took up nearly half the lesson’s allotted time.

  Dictation was followed by silent study of the mimeographed passage for précis, the actual writing of which was set daily for homework. When the bell rang and as the boys stood, gathered books, and began to file out, Mr. Fontane offered final nuggets, crying out almost gaily:

  Non-restrictive clauses are our quarry!

  On Friday evenings or Saturdays, the boys, pleading mental exhaustion and the need for restoration, started getting the train up to Victoria to lose themselves in the hot pleasures of the jam-packed club at 100 Oxford Street, home base of Humphrey Lyttleton and his band, though from time to time other bands took the stage: Mick Mulligan and his Magnolia Jazz Band with George Melly, Mike Daniels’ Delta Band, Alex Welsh, Ken Colyer, Chris Barber with Ottilie Patterson.

  Sometimes they went to The Six Bells in Chelsea to hear Alex Welsh, sometimes to Pizza Express in Dean Street. In sundry afternoon cafés with loud espresso machines and tired cheese rolls under plastic domes on the counter, the pale yellow rat-trap cheese sweating under wilted lettuce, they listened condescendingly to Lonnie Donegan’s mongrel skiffle.

  “Christ!” said Rob. “Thimbles! Washboards and thimbles!”

  Art, said Jimbo, should never try to be popular; the public should try to make itself artistic.

  “What do you think?” said Rob indicating the two girls on the banquette, girls pretending to ignore them, girls to whom Rob was too shy to speak but who had, he thought, distinct sexual possibilities.

  “Non-évoluées,” said Jimbo.

  “Cuddly, though,” said Rob.

  Jimbo looked at him and then looked away.

  The Rock Island line is the road to ride, said Rob.

  Pointing to the sandwich domes on the counter, Jimbo said, When I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.

  *

  The last train from Victoria rolled on through the night. Rob’s carriage was empty except for the girl and a blue serge porter, his leather bag in the aisle, a red flag and a green flag on wooden handles lodged under the bag’s flap. In the creaking silences, Rob pretended to study the diagram of the train’s station stops while sneaking glances at the girl’s reflection in the night window.

  She was wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse, suede desert boots, an undone duffle coat, a ponytail held by an imitation red flower the size of a fist, he didn’t know the name of them, autumn borders sort of thing, dahlia was the word in his mind.

  The railway man settled his peaked cap on his lard-pale pate and got up to get out, nudging his flag bag along against his knee.

  BRIXTON

  A rush of cold air into the carriage.

  On his way out of the club, Rob had picked up a crumpled Melody Maker. As he was flipping pages, glancing at the doings of the big dance bands, Jack Payne, Nat Gonella, Ray Noble, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone, photos of flossy-hair vocalists sheathed in sequins, the latest caterwaulers from Tin Pan Alley, Pops Parade, the crowning of Miss Musical Manchester, the girl said, “Were you at Uncle’s?”

  He looked up.

  Said to the girl’s reflection, “Pardon?”

  Then turned towards her.

  “Were you at Uncle Humphrey’s?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes. When you say ‘Uncle’, is he—”

  “No,” said the girl, “but he’s uncle-ish. Bonhomous. Gives you a fiver when he visits, slips you a drink in the kitchen, looks down your blouse. He’s always the same. You know what you’re going to get.”

  “Well, he does wear brothel creepers,” said Rob.

  “Bonhomie,” she said. “It makes me think of a man with a big gut and one of those watch-chains stretched over it.”

  “Old Humph?” He smiled. “The Old Grey Mare—”

  “She Ain’t What She Used To Be,” said the girl and with finger and thumb shot him in approbation.

  Then patted the seat beside her.

  “Robert Forde,” he said, “but usually it’s Rob.”

  “My surname is Marks,” she said, “and you can call me… Helena.”

  “Are you at school?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and, well, no. Sort of. And you? At school?”

  “Sixth form,” he said. “And you’re…?”

  “A-Levels. Sat three. Passed Religious Knowledge.”

  “What did you mean, yes and no?”

  “Suspended at the moment,” she said, “but shortly to be expelled.”

  She laughed and patted her head and rubbed her stomach simultaneously.

  “Can you do that?”

  Rob shook his head.

  “My father’s fighting it but I’ve got so far up Miss Henny-Penny’s nose she hasn’t much choice.”

  She laughed again.

  “Dried-up old twat.”

  “But why do you want—” said Rob.

  “Right to her face,” said Helena with relish. “She’s got to expel me. I called her dessicated to her face.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Because,” said Helena, “I. Am. Going. To. New. York.”

  Shuffling noise underneath the carriage, in the wheels.

  LOUGHBOROUGH JUNCTION

  ?

  “New York,” repeated Rob. “Doing what? I mean, if your father—”

  “He doesn’t know yet.”

  Rob looked at her.

  “He adores me,” she said, “I’m his little princess.”

  “Hmmm,” said Rob, his mind made mushy by the warmth of her thigh.

  “I’ve been accepted at Goldsmith’s,” she said.

  “Goldsmith’s? Sorry?”

  “Ha!” she said. “Only the art school. Only the best in London.”

  “Oh,” said Rob.

  “Yes,” she said, “and the Slade and Holborn—the Central School—they’ve seen my portfolio and I’m invited to apply for next term. Just to show him. Just to show him I can go anywhere. At the Central I could have Victor Passmore or Keith Vaughan.”

  Not having heard of either, Rob inclined his head doing a judicious, impressed face.

  “And I expect I could get into the Beaux Arts in Paris. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  She blew a farty noise.

  “Who cares about the Beaux Arts and the fucking Sla
de!”

  She gripped his wrist and shook it.

  “Henry Tonks is dead! Or hasn’t anyone heard!”

  She rolled the Melody Maker into a loud-hailer and shouted through it into the empty carriage

  HENRY TONKS IS DEAD

  HENRY TONKS IS DEAD

  “The train left that station years ago. This,” she dismissed the carriage, the train, the night’s reflections in the windows, “this isn’t the world. You know where the world is? The world isn’t here. The world’s not Paris. The world, Robert Forde, the world’s New York. And that’s where I’m going.”

  She batted the sheets of the Melody Maker with the back of her hand.

  “Uncle Humphrey’s just to fill in time until I can get there. And when I do, Robert Forde, when I do, it’s Bird and Diz.”

  People, he presumed, this Bird and Diz, he had no idea what she was talking about, this dead Tonks, New York people he supposed, made note to find out, but feeling excitedly captive to the passion in her voice and eyes.

  The train shuffling into a slow curve.

  SYDENHAM HILL

  He peered out at sodium lights.

  “So,” he said, to fill the little silence, “what kind of painting do you do?”

  “I’m an Abstract Expressionist,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  She turned in her seat and stared at him full-on.

  “Oh, don’t tell me!” she said. “Robert Forde! Don’t tell me!”

  So she told him.

  She told him about Arshile Gorky, the sound of charcoal, goose bumps, the featherlight charcoal stick jumping to the paper’s grain, the living rasp. She told him about Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline…

  Her hands wove shapes.

  She talked on and on, dealers and galleries, jazz clubs, Washington Square, this rather mysterious-sounding “The Village,” flapping her hand at his expression—lower Manhattan, for God’s sake, The Village, The Village, an incantation of words that washed over him as he watched her face and pretended to be unaware, as she gestured, of the play of the cloth of her blouse.

  Spinning out this Village spell, 52nd Street, The Village Vanguard, Minton’s, The Five Spot, The Blue Note, lofts, studios, storage racks, stretchers and shims, and in The Village she’d have her first show, magazines she’d seen, a dealer called Benevento she rather fancied, but when she was launched her sights were on one she had a feeling was the coming man, Leo Castelli, and she’d get a studio loft in one of the old textile buildings or dry-goods factories, somewhere still cheap, on the edge of The Village proper, Houston and Lafayette, she imagined, somewhere around there, a building with freight elevators big enough to take the canvases she’d paint…

  “It sounds wonderful,” he said. “Have you been there?”

  She focussed on him again.

  “No,” she said, “I’ve dreamed there.”

  “Was that WEST—”

  “DULWICH,” she said.

  The stopped train, doors slam-slamming, whistle, the lights flickering, the train sliding on into the night.

  Adolphe Gottliebe

  Jackson Pollock

  PENGE WEST

  As she scooped up her bag and a chiffon scarf and stood and as they made their way to the door she was talking rapturously about Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, Rothko, God! the colour! and elegies, something about elegies…

  And then the train’s dwindling tail lights and then they were standing on the cold, silent platform.

  She suddenly said, “Do you live here? In Penge?”

  “Next one,” he said, “Beckenham.”

  “Why did you get off then?”

  “Well,” said Rob, “we were talking, it was so interesting, I, um, well, I don’t know…”

  She seemed to consider him.

  “If you like,” she said, “you can walk me home.”

  They walked along the High Street and turned up a long hill. Helena was spreading her arms talking, getting in front of him and walking backwards talking, bubbly with excitement, irritably brushing aside the dead buddleia spears overhanging low front-garden walls, talking about space and size and scale and Franz Kline, a chap she’d mentioned earlier he vaguely recalled, a chap who used a paperhanger’s brush, no WRIST painting, no piddly three camel hairs and easel but great swaths of black, Helena said, ARM painting, spreading hers wide to demonstrate the inevitable body logic of GESTURE.

  The house looked huge, and to one side of it, and seemingly part of its grounds, there was part of a wall he could see, a black coppice. The drive was loud to walk on. Crushed white shells.

  Her key in the lock, she turned and put her hand on his arm.

  Stared into his eyes.

  “Do what thou wilt…” she said.

  The intensity of her gaze made him feel uncomfortable.

  He stared back at her.

  “…shall be the whole of the Law.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Aleister Crowley,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  He felt that his not knowing this person had somehow let her down.

  “Don’t keep saying ‘Pardon.’” she said. “Say ‘What.’”

  She put her finger to her lips and eased the door.

  “And take your shoes off.”

  The entrance hall seemed enormous, squares of black and white marble, a blazing chandelier, staircases curving on each side of the hall summoning a vision of Fred Astaire. It was the sort of chandelier, the size of it, like those in palaces or the State Rooms of country seats, though the glass pendant things, the “peardrops,” as Jimbo called them, were chunky rectangles of differing lengths, light shimmering up and down.

  She opened the pair of doors facing them.

  White carpet stretching everywhere. Furniture. Another pair of doors at the far side. On either side of the fireplace, long low bookcases, white, painted an olive green inside, vases and things on top, paperweights. Books and inch-thick shiny magazines. Above the slate mantelshelf, a big slabs-of-colour sort of painting, orange, yellow, umber, white, squares and rectangles, which slowly resolved themselves into stooped figures with machetes cutting—what would it be—sugar cane?

  “Yours?” he whispered.

  She gave him a narrow glance and snorted.

  “They bought it in the West Indies,” she said. “On a Sunshine Cruise.”

  She knelt and slid back the panel door of a cupboard in the line of bookcases. Twelve-inch LPs. She flipped along them until she pulled out what she was looking for and handed it up to him. Then she got up and stood beside him.

  “Oh, wow!” whispered Rob. “Good Time Jazz. I’ve heard of this label. You can’t get it here.”

  “It’s American,” she whispered. “My father brings these home for me, art magazines, records, stuff like that when he goes over there. When he does operations and lectures.”

  “So this,” said Rob, turning the record over, “is a reissue of 1946. George Lewis with Bunk.”

  He tapped the photograph.

  “Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau on bass.”

  He smiled at her.

  “‘Slow Drag!’”

  “Shsss!”

  “And here it is again,” said Rob. “That clarinet solo on Just a Closer Walk with Thee, they all say the accompaniment—there’s no drums or bass—they all say it’s guitar, but look at the photo! What’s Lawrence Marrero holding? A banjo!”

  “Shsss!”

  “And you’d have to be cloth-eared not to hear it anyway.”

  “Stop reading,” she whispered.

  She was standing close to him, her arm against his.

  “Take the record out.”

  He pushed the edge of the record sleeve against his chest, bowing it, and drew the record out, t
humb and forefinger, by its rim.

  “It’s red!” he said in astonishment.

  “And bendy,” she said. “See? And you can see through it!”

  She stood close beside him as he held the record up to the light. The room turned raspberry with the settee and chairs and television and coffee-table darker shapes, blurry, brownish in the red.

  “Let me see again, too,” she said.

  He angled the record closer to her.

  “If you twist it,” she said, “you can make new shapes. Do that chair.”

  He could feel wisps of her hair against his cheek. He could feel his heart, he could feel his breath shallow. He could feel her breast against his arm.

  “You can have it,” she said. “It’s a present.”

  “But it’s so, so…”

  I’ve heard it,” she said. “It’s a present.”

  “Helena—” he said.

  “I want you to have it. I want you to.”

  She put her hands either side of his waist and gave him a little push.

  “I’ll put the TV on,” she whispered, “so they’ll know I’m home. Then they won’t come down.”

  She paused.

  “Probably.”

  She switched it on and said, “But you’d better lie down behind the couch just in case.”

  He edged himself in between the back of the settee and the window curtains. Then he knelt. Then he put his arms down and stretched his legs out behind him as if he were going to do push-ups. His shoes dropped onto his back. Then he lowered himself until he was lying face-down, then squirmed over onto his back and lay staring up at the ceiling.

  He heard running footsteps, shouting, bursts of gunfire, cars accelerating.

  “Helena?” he whispered.

  Cars crashing.

  All the lighting was coming from somewhere just below the ceiling, “cove lighting” he believed it was called. He had never seen such a thing before in a house. He lay looking up towards it. It reminded him, the light flooding from the top, of one of Jimbo’s currently favoured words for windows, “clerestory.” Odd thumps his heart was giving.