Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

The view through that door, democratic shingle, curve of beach, would act as a prompt. For Stephen. Let her bring out the story in her own time. His book, his comeback, was already in ruins; a thing of fragments, false starts, muffled echoes. The Pevensey woman, in her unconvinced actuality, was a sidebar. And better for it.

She wasn’t dressed, dressed to receive visitors, when Stephen knocked. She’d forgotten the appointment. Another woman, stepping out of the dim interior, took over. And Stephen played along. Shock, trauma, terrible thing to witness. He toyed with his striped mug (she’d omitted to add the tea bag which would flavour the hot water).

Stephen sipped and waited. Something was wrong. Nobody was smoking. The furniture was unsaturated, minimalist. Londoners in retreat.

After an hour or so it became obvious, even to Stephen, that the women were not in shock, or in any way distressed. They were drunk — just slightly, becomingly, a day or two into the session, pacing themselves. It was Stephen who was edgy, a non-smoker hurting for a passive blast of nicotine (plus woman-breath).

A heavy glass of cordial, Ribena, baby juice, turned out — as the woman confessed, giggling — to be kir. She dosed herself at regular intervals. They’d been indoors, so the friend said, for the entire weekend, snacking on junk TV, voting celebrities out of self-inflicted hellholes, reading extracts aloud, celeb-lit, Zelda, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, all the wild women. Time out, away from the metropolis, relationships. In their own bodies. Relaxed to the point of becoming invertebrate.

What, the friend wanted to know, book in one hand, drink in the other, was Stephen doing here? Who was he? The period of comfort and sisterly support for the woman who had found the distressed body part was coming to an end. Outsiders were invading their sanctuary. The friend pulled on a child’s anorak when she heard the knock at the door.

‘When I was young, so high, and saw the sea for the first time, so my mother said, I threw open my arms and rushed at it. I wanted to embrace the whole affair, take it home with me.’

She laughed. And went outside to smoke, sitting uncomfortably on sharp stones.

Stephen, starting a head cold, remembered this, the woman’s words, that night in the Royal Hotel. The way she clicked a loose sandal against the sole of a bare brown foot. The sea would outlive him. ‘And ten,’ he muttered. The meter was ticking. But the game wasn’t over yet. Four score years.

‘And ten. Ten for good behaviour.’

Returned from his mildly erotic reverie, Stephen understood that the sea would never be anything but itself. It resisted simile. The lights of small boats, out there, winking. He couldn’t face that window a moment longer, the cinema of ghosts. The unsynchronised conversations of lovers and film-termites, couples who shared tables like prisoner and escort, like day-release lunatics. They were, all of them, unfit for society. They used the seaside hotel as a decompression chamber.

The cocktail bar, hidden around an L-bend, was the only viable solution. Almost empty bottles hung like deserters, dirty glasses caught by the heels. Varnished cherries left so long in the pot that they congealed into a tumour, knobbly cancerous balls. A plastic pineapple, open, in which the ice had melted into slush.

Stephen couldn’t bring himself to register any of it. Everything was looking, looking at him. The bottles, the sticky-slick bar surface, the mirror strip. How was it managed, this exchange, seeing and being seen? Remembering? Describing? Editing? Peripheral vision, field of vision; looking and not looking. Looking aslant, slices of the actual: bamboo-faced bar, red leatherette stools (with chipped chrome), the absence of the sea.

The painting. Stephen noticed the painting. A way out of his dilemma, a false window. A view of the sea. View from My Window. A Tollund. Tollund’s painting. He did not notice the tall woman in the white linen jacket who had stepped up behind him.

‘So there it is,’ she said. ‘It had to be somewhere. But somewhere is never where we expect to find things.’

Stephen had lost interest in Tollund. He despised the man — for trying to fix the future by nailing the absolute to a significant moment, a view. Tollund complemented the murder, a parallel narrative: that’s what he was trying for, just enough artifice to give spice to a shilling-shocker.

The painting dressed an ugly set.

‘Shall we go back,’ she said, ‘to your place? And decide what we’re going to do about it?’

On the balcony: Cora in a borrowed coat, lifted from a peg by the door, Stephen shivering. They face the sea, a narrow shelf over the coast road, ambulances and squad cars with sirens blaring. The building was floodlit from below, turning Cora, collar up, into a film-noir beauty, a figure of fate. Rain fell in discrete beads. Stephen reached out for them. Before they disappeared into a fuzz of white light. Heavier beads ran along the balcony rail. The sea was a separateness, in which they were joined. His eyes were scratched like old celluloid. Intimations of advancing cataracts.

It wasn’t working. Stephen was aware, for the first time, of his own smell, that he inhabited it. It had never bothered him before; living alone by choice, it didn’t register. His refusal to bathe, shower, began as distaste for squandering natural resources. The foible matured into habit, obsession; he arranged his life by such minor and unconsidered resolutions. If he looked at the sea, he should respect that substance, water, by leaving it alone. He shaved in whatever was left in the kettle when he’d brewed his morning tea.

Cora’s essence, her ‘principality’ as some film buff used the term (in relation to the young Jane Fonda), extended a few inches from her skin. This was her place, moving as she moved: rain beads running down a slick collar. Inviolable.

The great landlocked mass of the flats, the Ocean Queen, was a speculation that had foundered, too tired, post-historic, botched and patched, even for south-coast property sharks. The white-stone liner was loud with silenced voices. Its client base: the Undead. Very old people, worn to their last layer of skin, keeping deathwatch on a fading sea. Veterans of the Thirties, confined to their cabins, outlived by arthritic pets. Pigeon-squatted shooting-galleries with broken windows. Art Deco cells for asylum-seekers and economic migrants.

Red sails too close to the glass. Tollund, by that time, couldn’t do middle distance. His armchair floated out over the ocean. The busy little yachts of the sailing club were gulls’ wings, blades on an oily sea.

‘Deferred immortality,’ Cora said. ‘Empty chair: death. Yachts: messenger birds, hope of resurrection and eternal life.’

Back inside, they saw that Stephen’s chair was the right chair. Tollund’s chair. The inspiration for the painting that now hung above the bar in the Royal Hotel. Their twin quests — art and murder — fused and fizzled into nothingness. The butchered priest, the boy who hanged himself in his cell, the machinations of bent antique dealers, reduced to fiction. A life, Stephen improvised, to stand for his own.

The woman, spectre or culture vamp, could carry this no further. Two dimmed consciousnesses, in the shadows of an unlit room, focusing on a bright morning scene that had once been captured and was now forgotten, irrelevant.

Tollund’s seascape, Cora understood, had hung in the study of the vicar (private income, hilltop mansion). The painting concealed the peephole through which the murdered man watched boys bathing in the great green enamel tub in which he himself would be strangled and drowned.

Out in the Channel, the boat with the lantern rocked backwards and forwards on the night tide. In a locker, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the head of the painting’s last owner, the benevolent vicar. His eyes were open, clear, blue as a Mediterranean sky. The head faced the scene the painter had sketched for him, on commission, all those years ago. A chair with twin indentations, the wrinkled cheeks of the pillows.