Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Could be worse,’Jos said. ‘Welcome to the company of one-eyed jacks. Movie directors have always understood the glamour of the piratical patch. It keeps them in work.’

‘Fuck you. The one-eyed jack, split Cyclops, is the penis. Brando chucking Kubrick off-set, out of America. On towards the black dust of Beckton, his Vietnam. One-Eyed Jacks is a gay western, written by Calder Willingham. Whipping, posing and moodying about with smashed fingers. A Hollywood Freud fest . Pat Garrett and Billy the kid in drag.’

Take his mind off the eye thing, psychosomatic, thought kindly Kaporal. Compile a list: one-eyed directors.

‘I’ll start,’ he volunteered. ‘Raoul Walsh. A bird, wasn’t it? Smashed through the windscreen when he was driving to some desert location? Eye-patch adds character. The story Mitchum always told about Walsh spilling tobacco from his roll-ups. You can’t judge distance, sorry.’

‘André de Toth,’ I came back. ‘ House of Wax . A 3-D horror flick made by a one-eyed director.’

‘Skiing accident. André started out covering the Nazi invasion of Poland, then married Veronica Lake. Can you tell, do you think, the before and after films? Binocular and monocular vision?’

‘Fritz Lang,’ I said. ‘He gives great eye-patch in Le Mépris . That might be cosmetic. Fancied himself in a monocle. His Westerns are good and camp, but they don’t do landscape.’

‘Wayne as Rooster Cogburn,’ Kaporal mused. ‘Think Hathaway was taking the piss out of Walsh? The Duke as a fat parody of an eye-patched rival director? Or was it the great Ford? Old John in his later years?’

‘Nicholas Ray. Guesting in The American Friend , he patched up.’

‘And Jarman,’ Kaporal trumped me. As we drove towards the coast, the fabled beach chalet in Dungeness, the rock garden. ‘He went blind. Blue . The screen itself as subject. Voice. Light of projector beam. Blue on blue. Transcendence.’

We skirted Hastings on the high road, the Ridge, took to lanes and tracks between hedges. Ollie perked up at the reflected brightness of the sea. Kaporal’s lists didn’t help, the imminence of that mythical personality, Mr Mocatta, was overwhelming. I had nothing left to say. I experimented with partial and total blindness — without Jarman’s puckish spirit, his poetry.

Fairlight. Good name. A Lookout Station. Military detritus. Country park. Olivia Fairlight-Jones. This was a sort of homecoming for Ollie, hyphen like an umbilical cord between present self and memories of childhood. Cliff walks and private beaches. Ships that had gone aground.

Phil Tock rubbed his hand, nervously, in circles on his bald skull, warming the ridges. O’Driscoll whistled. The gates were opened by remote control, an unseen electrical eye. The drive descended, by steep and slithery curves, through woodland. It seemed as though nobody had come this way in years.

‘You sure this is right?’ said Tock. ‘Ask a local.’

‘Oh yeah — and where you gonna find one?’ O’Driscoll sneered. ‘This has to be it. Rest of the village gone off of the cliff years ago.’

Mocatta’s house was Manderley (Hitchcock’s version). Or Welles’s Xanadu. A fake. A fraud. A broken set (on which some schlock merchant would shoot a quickie over the weekend). A gothic monster still in development — with classical and Egyptian revisions. The only comparison, as an achieved structure, would be the front elevation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields: that is, three churches or temples, different eras, piled one on top of the other (but staying, miraculously, vertiginously, in balance). Mocatta, as his own architect, was car-boot Hawksmoor. Doric columns from a demolished Midland bank. Granite steps from a Gents’ toilet in Bexhill. Landseer lions (repro). War memorial obelisks: erased names. A Mississippi mansion that was sliding, verandah first, into the English Channel.

Mocatta had builders instead of friends. They decamped, unpaid, when he went inside (eighteen months on remand). Much of the roof was missing, tiles stripped. Rain left puddles in the hall.

Tock stayed by the car, O’Driscoll lit a cigarette. Kaporal worked on his list. While Ollie, taking my hand, led me down an epic corridor; oil paintings in ornate frames turned to face the wall. She looked into many empty rooms, shrouded furniture, undraped windows. Expensive carpets into which sheep pellets had been trodden. Brisk bushes growing through the boards, strangling white statues of naked gods.

Deep in what might have been, in one of the establishments on which this folly was loosely based, the servants’ quarters, Ollie located an occupied space, a kitchen: an old biddy, fag in mouth, gin bottle within reach, stirring a reeking pot. Carpet slippers, wrinkled stockings. Winter coat (coney collar) over flowered pinafore. A pale-green Aga, the only warmth in the place. And standing stiffly, well within thermal range, was a man playing cards. Playing with himself, Patience. Double pack spread across a marble counter: click click click. He didn’t take his eyes from his apparently endless game.

‘Hello, Nan,’ Ollie said. ‘Lunch ready?’

‘Chicken soup,’ the cook replied. ‘Made with rabbit. Fowls sick, lost their feathers. Fox got most of them.’

The cardplayer, moving painfully (to studied effect), advanced on the stove, turning his head to evaluate, in turn, the intruders, half-blind old man and bright young girl.

‘Daddy!’ Ollie rushed at him. ‘I’d like you to meet my fiancé.’ There was a long, tense silence. And then, right on the beat, they both laughed. And went on laughing as my legs gave way.

‘Over my dead body,’ Mocatta said, tenderly massaging the small of his back. ‘Or his.’

Brown suits, in the country, if inherited, are acceptable — but the Fairlight magnate had miscalculated both the cut (near Vorticist) and the depth of brown (Nuremberg, 1934). The effect, coupled with elastic-sided Chelsea boots, was contradictory and sick-making: Fascist mufti with Tin Pan Alley tailoring, Aldgate sweatshop ripping off a P.G. Wodehouse dustwrapper.

‘Don’t tease,’ said Ollie, slipping her arm through her father’s and leading him to the table, where he refused to sit.

He winced. ‘This idiotic court case. Do I look stupid enough to hire a hitman aged seventy-five who lives above a launderette in St Leonards? A pensioner who sees a vision of Our Lady in a damp patch on the ceiling and walks straight round to the cop shop. Confesses, implicates me, and asks for seven other stiffs to be disinterred, Hastings to Horsham. I’ve been on my bloody feet since they let me out last Friday. Playing Polish Patience. You need two packs. Take my mind off the sheer fucking agony.’

‘Poor Daddy.’

‘So which of these cunts got you up the duff? Porker or egghead? Fetch O’Driscoll and sort the dirty little sod out, then we’ll have some of Nan’s soup. God help us.’

Kaporal’s clenched buttocks were squeaking in the style approved by Sir Alex Ferguson: unlubricated penetration of a rubber woman. He couldn’t eat a thing, even if Granny Mocatta fed him with a silver spoon.

And it was worse for me, the guilty man. I was quite prepared for a shotgun wedding: so long as they didn’t pull the trigger. I find a third wife, new home, ready-made family, and it ends in farce: clownish dialogue, tumbledown set, pantomime villains. And just when I’m kidding myself, a totally novel experience, that my Shakespearean symmetries are working out. Established world collapses into chaos (blood, madness, storm), before order is restored: winter into spring. Lovers pared off by hierarchy: king with queen, duke with duchess, peasant with peasant (comedy turns).