Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

We crunched gravel. The man, rake gripped like a Morris dancer, moved diagonally across his patch — to protect it and cut us off.

‘My friend!’

His moustache, the absence of it, had me fooled. But Kaporal was better with Identikit portraits.

‘Drin?’

The quiet man, it appeared, spoke fluent — if formal — English: after the fashion of Joseph Conrad. Another caricature I’d miscalculated.

‘Jos-eph. And you also, Mr Norton. Mademoiselle, I am charmed.’

Drin, after the ibis fiasco, had returned to the coast. His six months’ quarantine was over. He was legit: a gardener and handyman taking night classes to reacquire his medical qualifications. Drin was an anaesthetist.

‘Achmed?’

Achmed, it seems, in partnership with some Russians, was managing a video shop in Southend. And telling his story to a scriptwriter who wanted to recreate the adventurous journey to Sangatte as a dramatised documentary.

We shook hands with the Albanian. He embraced Kaporal, kissed him on both cheeks. They exchanged mobile-phone numbers. And promises neither man would keep.

Lifting the weight of the brass knocker — a wolf’s head — I had one of those moments: après vu. The conviction that I would be repeating this action for ever. It was so familiar, the way the knocker adhered to the paint. The absence of an electric bell. The longshot from the road: ash, ivy, laurel. That afternoon with the journalist, last year, searching for the boarding house in which Aleister Crowley died. We were, back then, on the wrong side of the Ridge — taking in the seaview, the spread of the town. The kind of houses that become prep schools, retirement homes, sets for Fawlty Towers . The hubris of Edwardian social mobility (cash from the colonies) brought down by a primitive ring road, the continuity of broken traffic.

Do you find, when you know an author, that you can see precisely how his fictions draw upon experience? The flat in Camden Town that he loans out to his female lead, after a thorough cleaning, belongs to an sf encyclopaedist. The lecture at the ICA — ‘smelling of wet wool’ — is one that he himself delivered, a year earlier. Life is an inadequate rehearsal for text. The unsuspecting reader decides to follow, one bright afternoon, a fictional trail along the canal bank. A photographer, on a whim, after discovering that Compendium Bookshop is now defunct, walks back to Hackney. And notices, months later, toying with a box of prints, the way a woman with a rucksack, eyes on the ground, misses the sinister transaction whereby two men in hooded sweatshirts wrestle a typewriter from the grasp of a fat boy.

‘Yes?’

A woman in black bombazine. Backlit in doorway. Waiting. Door open a slit. Fern in blue pot. Brown envelopes on small table.

An act of will, a nudge from Ollie: the gears click.

‘Mrs Norton. We’ve arranged to see her.’

The length of the windows, tall and narrow — are they expecting an imminent attack by archers? The old folk, the few who are inside, are very dapper. The click of croquet balls on the lawn at the back. And the click of false teeth anticipating crumpets.

Mrs Norton promises a tour of the garden after tea. She’s tanned, check shirt and jeans, and looks much fitter and brighter-eyed than anything I’ve seen recently in my shaving mirror.

‘Sit down, dear.’

‘What’s that very pleasant smell?’ I said. ‘Leafy, woody. Bit like cinnamon. Wrong season for bonfires, surely?’

‘Oh, that’ll be the crematorium. Wind’s from the east today.’ She hoots at my discomfort.

Our precise relationship takes a while to establish, a question of memory: mine. Her husband is my father’s first cousin. Old Arthur, who had six children (three of each, between voyages), was grandfather to both men. Mrs Norton, Winnie, was young Arthur’s second wife. He’d been gone now twelve years. Tea-blender (family tradition) in the City. Winnie worked in the office. They lived in Wimbledon. For the tennis. Competed twice in the mixed doubles. Won a cup in a tournament sponsored by the Standard . She’ll find the photo later. They retired to a house in Silverhill, near the park, the courts. It got too much when Arthur passed on.

‘This is such a lovely place. I have my own bed, flower bed. And I walk to town every Saturday for shopping and a drink. There’s still a few of us left, the tennis crowd. It feels right to live in a house with a family connection. Even if it’s not my family. I’m a Londoner, through and through, Sydenham to Norbiton. End of the line.’

‘Family — in Hastings?’

‘Oh yes, dear. Old Arthur built this pile when he left Ceylon. Before he went off on his travels. A Mr Stevenson, who was with him in Peru, bought it from the widow. He made the conversion. Apartments. Commercial hotel. Hospital in the Second War. Boarding house. And now apartments again. Some of the girls have been here through all the changes.’

One of these girls, seventy-plus and rattling the cups on an ebony tray, brought us our tea.

‘Thanks, Naomi. Lovely, dear.’

Winnie Norton took over.

‘She struggles backwards and forwards to Ore, poor old thing, every day. Won’t retire.’

The cake was high-density fruit, black as anthracite. The tea, which Winnie took without milk or sugar, was excellent. It tasted of something strange, the leaf; it cleared the head, unblocked nasal passages, and was both flowery and bitter.

‘So this is your young lady?’

Winnie smiled at Ollie. A conspiracy of diminutives.

‘No, actually —’

‘I thought not. She’s got a lovely complexion.’

Winnie asked me to stay where I was, enjoying a second cup, while she took Ollie to her room to fetch Arthur’s Kodak and the photo albums. It wouldn’t be right for a gentleman, even a relative, to visit her bedroom in broad daylight.

When they’d gone, I walked to the window: a view over sloping lawns to woods and a shady valley.

‘Shall I clear now, sir?’

Naomi appeared at my shoulder.

‘Thanks, yes. I think they’ve finished.’

Naomi didn’t move. The furniture in this room, older than the waitress, displaced its own weight in memory; indentations of those who had sat, dreamt, succumbed. I thought of movie stars in old age, letting the booze get its revenge. Mitchum. Sinatra with his rug and belly, broken voice. James Stewart and Richard Widmark on the riverbank in Two Rode Together : silly in hairpieces, unable to hear blind John Ford’s instructions. What does it take to survive the death thing, the human contract? Courage. Forgetfulness. And an open-ended ticket to Switzerland, one of those lakeside clinics.

‘He’s there now, the old devil. By the ilex, sir. Staring in,’ Naomi whispered. ‘Eyes like a fox.’

I couldn’t see anyone in the garden, resident or intruder.

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Who are we talking about?’

But I knew very well who she meant, the Great Beast. Aleister Crowley. Only the dead see the dead. They don’t go away, the more persistent of them, they hang about like old actors who can no longer find the route to the Green Room. Some moan and rattle, most are sad, waiting on the platform of a station where trains don’t stop. Crowley with his glistening bald skull, his shrunken bulk, was trapped in the boredom of endlessness, in the shrubbery. The immortality he always solicited: suburban Hastings.

Visible to a crone in black. Who, as a young girl, had carried up his breakfast tray when the shakes were on and he couldn’t find the strength to come downstairs. To make the performance, magus of the cold meats. Servant of Satan.

Even for those who love photographs, there comes a point of album fatigue. Too many beards, too many brides. Too many beaches. The faces of the dead, curated by the dying, solicit one last hurrah: remember me .