Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Typical, I thought. I have the ant heap at my mercy, top to bottom (plenty of that), Queen Mum’s transvestite routs, Blunt’s rough-trade pick-ups (diversifying dockers), future ivory-finish novelists, the passport to the secrets of London — and I flounce out, nose in air. Graham Greene, Guy Burgess, Ronnie Kray, Lord Boothby, Anita Brookner, Brian Sewell: I missed them all. The men from MI5 and MI6, shuffling in through the tradesman’s entrance, pipes and macs, for their free tutorials. The Saturday night parties when the students were safely removed to South Ken, Fulham and Battersea.

That quarter of the town, those pavements, wide, clean, disconcerted me. I couldn’t get the hang of it: how to walk without looking like a CCTV suspect, all hunch and hood. How to stroll without expectation of being shoved against the fence by a teenage toller, a crack fiend with a Stanley knife, a foam-flecked outpatient preaching madness. Manchester Square happened behind closed doors, padlocked gardens, quilted service flats fading into sepia. Assignations took place in the Wallace Collection; elderly romantics, creaking gentlemen and vamps with purple lips and nicotine teeth. Tired spies going through the motions in the last rites of a discredited system. Music and medicine, specialists in surgical and orthopaedic instruments. Blue-plaque Georgian properties leaking Schubert. Fetishist furniture, German, for the electively crippled. Sadists and masochists with the income to support their refined tastes.

What had this to do with David Rodinsky? Rodinsky: the Whitechapel hermit, the mysterious figure who vanished from his locked room above a synagogue in Princelet Street, sometime in the Sixties. He left a friable London A-Z that was marked, in red Biro, with a number of routes, possible pilgrimages. One led to Claybury Hospital, where his sister died, the germination of the still-to-be-conceived M11. One meandered, in a fugue of forgetfulness, stopping and starting, through Dagenham. And another, the most enigmatic, moved from the ghetto, through Clerkenwell, over Holborn Viaduct, to Bloomsbury and Oxford Street. Why? What possible business had the orthodox scholar, holy fool, joker and accumulator of rubbish, with Portman Square, Manchester Square and the Courtauld Institute? A calendar with a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus hung on the greasy wall of Rodinsky’s garret. Did he, sniffling, snot on sleeve, attend an open lecture at the Institute? Did he know Blunt?

These questions were far ahead of me when I met, and was dazzled, by Ruth. Do you know that stomach-turning shock of recognition? Impossible to take a breath, lift a hand. To speak in your own voice. Every detail of how she looked, brown top dressed with a clasp made from three small silver coins, grey skirt, stays with me, displacing a certain shape, shaping a hole that can never be filled. The way she sat, crossed her legs. The hair. The turn, the smile. I wouldn’t have said, before this coup de foudre, that she was my type — if I had a type, beyond the waifs and strays, pub occasionals who would break away from the group for a single unremarkable night. Hair (infrequently washed), long and tangled. Mascara. Eyes like a road accident. Black clothes or improvised layers of fabric, charity-shop coats. Yellow fingers. That smell of multiple-occupation chenille and patchouli oil. Drink you into a coma. Tears at bedtime. I had to fake the cruelty they were searching for, the stamina to listen to the tale.

During those few, unreal weeks at the Courtauld, a pattern was set; the weather was good, autumnal, provocative, and I walked, after lectures, for hours through quarters of London that I’d previously seen through the windows of moving vehicles. The people who lived here were invisible. The ones I noticed were, like myself, tolerated visitors: tourists, Arabs, gallery users with undeclared motives, the diseased and damaged soliciting verdicts, panaceas of expensive furniture, heavy curtains. Tanned specialists with clean fingernails and pocket handkerchiefs that matched their heavy silk ties (in the style perfected by Lord Bragg).

I took Ruth to the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. There might have been some loose cultural connection between John Golding’s lectures on Cubism and my instinct to wander through this quiet building with its walls of tribal masks and glass cabinets of delicate whalebone carvings. It was where I spent most of my afternoons; drifting through the galleries, scribbling illegible phrases and uncertain facts in my red notebook, thinking about my great-grandfather’s expedition up the Rio Perene. I meditated an impossible and very soon abandoned work in which I would blend — in imitation of Paul Metcalf (great-grandson of Herman Melville) — Peruvian travel journals from the nineteenth century with lecture notes on Cézanne’s obsessive reconfiguring of Mont Sainte-Victoire (the thing seen from a pine-fringed distance, his Beckton Alp), and walks taken through the topography of Mayfair and Marylebone. In Metcalf’s 1971 book, Patagoni , he shifts very smoothly from the Detroit of Henry Ford to his own Peruvian journals: ‘ A man is anxious, restless, a pressure on the breast — the frame shudders, limbs tremble.’ It can’t have been easy, I thought, to have Melville peering over your shoulder.

We left the court together and, later, the pub. Ruth’s friend escaped with a fine. Back in Westbourne Park, they picked up a few mates and headed off to a dive at the scruffy end of Portobello Road. I wasn’t fond of the area, even then, but I tagged along. Drinks on the table, they lit up: part of the general amnesty. Traders with gear to sell, wobbly writers, sessions men between sessions. Ruth didn’t do pints, as the others did, regularly on the quarter-hour; she hugged the joint. The afternoon stretched.

Talking, we brought our conversation out into the street, away from the others, routes I didn’t know. We wandered through the park to her basement flat in Cornwall Gardens. Straight to bed. And stayed there for the weekend (the sheets had pale-yellow stripes). At some point on Saturday afternoon, when I slipped out for food (rollmops, crusty bread, cheese in plastic, two leaking cartons of that exotic culinary newcomer, yoghurt), I made up my mind. I asked her to marry me.

Better to marry than to yearn.

Ruth suffered from several disadvantages that I was prepared to overlook: she was English, a country family, Lincolnshire. Established and orthodox in opinions. She’d done school, university, a pass at Goa, and was now working in the office of an impressively foul architect, somewhere in Paddington. In London, she never ventured east of Tottenham Court Road. She wouldn’t give me an answer, too politic to make a decision in the derangement of the present, rumpled sheets, pillows on floor, shared bath, midnight coffee and rolls in the Cromwell Road Air Terminal.

She didn’t know anything about Marcuse or Foucault, had never heard of Jung or Brecht, never read The Waste Land . Never been a member of CND or the Trots. I thought she was joking, it was too good to be true. None of that stuff came up until we’d been together for a couple of months, Chinese restaurants, bistros like the Ark in — where was it — Palace Gardens Terrace? Not far from Bernard Stone’s poetry bookshop. And the guy who sold Aleister Crowley material to Jimmy Page.

Black-and-white photos of Parisian vagrants on bamboo walls. Beef stews with French names, cheap red wine.

Males couldn’t help themselves. They stared at Ruth, waiters in aprons and advertising men in loud striped shirts. Noise levels dropped as hearts missed a beat. I stared too, when I could, her reflection in speckled mirrors. Through curtains of smoke and noise, I listened to her life, the factored anecdotes. Small confessions. Her sense of family. Men trailed after Ruth in the street. Knocked, late or early, at our door; dry-mouthed, twisting with awkwardness, they asked her out. Asked her to pose. Offered modelling contracts. Film parts. Begged her to move in with them. She had a particular appeal for large, smiling Nigerians and thick-necked squires in hairy suits.