Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Arthur Norton with his laughter lines, hair, watchchain: I couldn’t find anything to connect us. Paterfamilias. Property owner. Wife, children, servants. Arranged, time and again, for local photographers: E. Geering and Alexander Wilkie (615 Gt Northern Road, Aberdeen). Slender daughters, sons in kilts (the future Nostromoner has a fat book in his lap).

But one card, tissue wrapped, was of a different order: a portrait taken by a photographer who actually looked at Arthur, wondered what he was about and how to present him.

‘San Francisco, we think,’ Winnie said. ‘It’s inscribed but I can’t make out the signature. Before the earthquake.’

‘I didn’t know Arthur was in San Francisco?’

‘On his way, my husband decided, to Central America. Before Peru. I want you to have it. And the camera. You still do the writing?’

‘I’d like to give it another shot, yes. Sometime.’

‘Come back, please,’ Winnie said. To Ollie. ‘I like you very much. Bring your young chap. Or we could meet in town. Don’t ring, I’m a little bit deaf. Just come when you fancy it, a lovely walk. Do come, dear. Goodbye, Andrew.’

I gave Ollie my keys. She was prepared (and qualified) to develop the film that had been lodged in the black box of that camera for over a hundred years. The instrument was the twin of the Kodak used by Bram Stoker’s Jonathan Harker when he was prospecting for property investments in Thames Gateway on behalf of an overseas client, Count Dracula. Harker got there more than a hundred years ahead of Jimmy Seed.

‘I have taken with my kodak views of it,’ he wrote in his journal. Carfax Abbey, Purfleet. ‘There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum.’

Arthur Norton’s Peruvian film was the escape clause for my disintegrating fiction. Leave it with Ollie. She was right, I didn’t deserve her. Give her to Kaporal, the better man. He would walk alongside this young woman to Cunard Court, take her to my flat. Then cook a meal, spaghetti with all the trimmings, while she converted my shower-cupboard into a darkroom.

What was the final entry in Arthur’s journal? A ravine: precipitous cliffs above, perpendicular rocks below, a roaring torrent at the bottom of the gorge, on the margin of which we could see gold-seekers washing out the mud .

Arthur’s party, diminished, exhausted, make camp. The gold-seekers offer no hospitality. The Indians vanish in the night. There is a cave in which Arthur finds shelter against a tropical downpour. The smell forbids sleep. A poisonous gas that no bird or beast can live near. Rats running across the puddled floor drop down dead; the snake that pursues them shares the same fate; while birds flying above drop down and fly no more. The place is fatal to birds, vermin, and all creeping creatures who come across it .

Now we were so close to a solution, I had to distance myself from the action. Give Ollie time to do her work. I was like an expectant father. I needed somewhere to pace, a bench on which to enjoy a cigar. This wouldn’t be easy. I had a superstition about sitting on anything with a memorial plate: no names, dates, no more views (favourite or otherwise). The Hastings Museum then. Let Ollie take the direct route, the steep descent; I’ll sidle, meander over nursery slopes, to the gallery in the park. Another encounter with my old friend, Harbour Scene with Yachts by Keith Baynes.

Because, very soon, one bright day, without warning, the painting won’t be there: not for me. My good eye had closed and the weak one was murky. I couldn’t face the operations, forms, bills, writing time lost. Baynes made colour you could taste, he was the Marine Ices of seascapes: buttery chalk, chocolate chip, melon green. He taught your eyes to salivate.

His story, like the myths of the chopped-up parson, the Brink’s- Mat gold, would never be resolved. There were no hard facts, no secrets in museum files. But the gallery in which his painting hung was a fine place to visit, romancers and their circumscribed visions: the same shore with different characters. The same characters in different hats.

There was never anybody in the gallery. Before today.

‘Have you noticed,’ the woman said, ‘those pencil marks? Go on, get in close. There . And again there. Top right, vertical. Bottom left, horizontal. Framing marks — which the framer ignored? A hint of the missing window?’

She was tall. I liked the scent of her.

The Baynes painting was swimming. I was losing it, colour without form.

Hat and decorative veil. Was this vision a wedding guest? Plum suede skirt with slash to show off the legs. Ankle-boots. Complicated scarves, rings, bangles. She was in good nick, but older than I had imagined — about my own age. The woman from the Bo-Peep Inn. The one who left typewritten stories at my door.

‘Marina,’ she said. ‘Marina Fountain.’

And she shook my hand.

Walking down through the gardens with Marina Fountain, skateboard ramps, White Queen Theatre and on to the Grand Parade, felt right. The fret was stopped in me, the constant self-interrogation: a break in consciousness whereby old arguments faded into the tidal drag (motorway sound slowed to the point where it soothes). A skinned and glittering sea. The tottering hulk of Cunard Court as a reassuring ghost: deserted ballroom, cracked swimming pool (filled with bags of cement, mounds of sand), rusty balconies. One light on the seventh floor.

‘Let Ollie finish the developing. We’ll have a drink.’

I didn’t say it. She knew what I was thinking. She knew the men from the Adelphi Hotel, pacing, agitated on cell phones. Drinkers, dispersed from their favoured sites on the lower walk, opposite the theatre, had atomised into smaller groups; ciderheads, dark-blue lager tins, silver tins. One school hung around the Gents, shirts out, ruddy, swaying and singing, a piss party. A family group with dogs and babies staked out the bus shelter. Trios, couples and solitaries balkanised alcoves, tactfully organised along the shingle’s edge, carpets of pale-orange butts, punctured cans. ‘Marina Marina Marina.’

They clinked in her honour. One of them tried to stand up, to kiss her hand. ‘Have a wet, Marina. See yus Marina. Right, Marina, right?’

I assumed, with no good reason, that she lived in Cunard Court. Where else? That retro look. Those legs.

‘I know where Baynes painted that view,’ she said. We paused alongside the weather station: a decision about that drink would have to be made, the venue. Marina made it.

‘Which floor?’ I asked.

It didn’t matter. My book was never going to work. I couldn’t pull it together; as usual I’d gathered far too much material — incontinent research, undisciplined, reckless, a pyramid made from worms.

‘Tell you on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘You take me dancing.’

My knees were gone. My legs belonged on an Edwardian billiard table. It had been years. I came from the wrong era. Proper dancing vanished with National Service.

The Royal Victoria Hotel, that iced cake with the tattered Union Flag, had a piano and a cocktail pianist with Jerry Lee Lewis hair and a greasy tux, the shakes under control, a limited repertoire: each golden oldie more depressing than the last. Unlikely couples with bottled tans, leftover from the days when TV announcers wore dinner jackets, went through the moves with robotic precision, before subsiding into their gilded coffins.

‘I love to dance. Remember?’

Almost.

A warped Polaroid. A small fantasy: she touched my arm, coming through the streets of Notting Hill, late, after a boozy meal, in a cocoon of unconcern; knowing ourselves, one through the other, not knowing how it would go, what form our lovemaking would take.