Alan Hollinghurst - Offshore

The elusive glimpses back through the history of the river and its people are most memorably captured in the ‘bricking’ expedition of chapter 6, where Martha and Tilda trundle off over Battersea Bridge with their handcart to mudlark on the foreshore by Old St Mary’s Church. Here at low tide, by the wreck of a brick barge sunk before the war, they may sometimes still find ruby-red lustre tiles by William De Morgan – whose ‘very last pottery’, as Martha knows, ‘was at Sands End in Fulham’. These fabulous fragments plucked from the mud – a sinuous-tailed dragon, a ‘delicate grotesque silver bird’ – are trophies too from the world of William Morris and of Pre-Raphaelitism that Fitzgerald herself had so sensitively explored. In a piece on De Morgan written nearly twenty years later she recalled the artist’s sister-in-law Wilhelmina Stirling, a keeper of the flame who died in her hundredth year in 1965, a ‘valiant … even heroic’ figure, whom she (like Martha and Tilda after her) had visited at her Battersea house, where the ‘walls and recesses glowed with colour’. ‘Mrs Wilhelmina Stirling … ninety-seven if she’s a day,’ declares six-year-old Tilda, explaining her precocious knowledge and establishing their link across a century. The girls get £3 for their tiles, in a King’s Road antique shop, and go off to buy a Cliff Richard record with the proceeds.

Offshore is set in 1961 or ’62 (the internal evidence is inconsistent, as our memories of an epoch often are more than fifteen years later), so that when it was published in 1979 its present day was already a bygone period and mood. Heinrich, the well-connected Austrian teenager who comes to visit Grace and dazzles Martha, is keen to taste the excitement of the newly swinging city. She takes him off down the King’s Road, then in ‘its heyday … like a gypsy encampment … A paradise for children, a riot of misrule.’ Antique shops coexist with boutiques ‘breathing out incense and heavy soul’, and with coffee bars, ‘something new in London’, where ‘the shining Gaggia dispensed one-and-a-half inches of bitter froth into an earthenware cup, and for two shillings lovers could sit for many hours in the dark brown shadows, with a bowl of brown sugar between them.’ It’s a world ‘fated to last only a few years before the spell was broken’, and it is one that the older novelist acknowledges as the playground of her own children, by now of course grown-ups themselves. We see, very delicately touched in, the overlapping pattern of the generations, and feel that tension of latent change which always fascinated Fitzgerald, and bore such magnificent fruit in her late quartet of historical novels.

Alan Hollinghurst

2013

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