Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The architectural producer — the one with the serious tweed jacket, who ‘used to know your friend, the poet, Eric Whatsisname’ — is a man who understands the value of time. He calls loudly for a second platter of new potatoes before we’ve finalized our power-plays over the seating arrangements. The potatoes are dwarf hybrids, the size of slightly pregnant peas. You get five each. The serious jacket is working on a calculation of their weight by volume. He has that combative attitude so prevalent among people who spend their lives bluffing genuine enthusiasts into believing they know nothing about their own subject. And will need a sturdy lifeline from a sympathetic producer. He had been co-opted into Architecture from the London School of Economics; and — having made two films in five years — was generally held to be doing an excellent job, in not wasting public money.

The other nob is distinctly ‘Arts’; and proves it, by arriving just in time for the lemon sorbet — and still securing more than his fair share of the Austrian anti-freeze. He’s one of the Nigels. The first thing people ask about them is: ‘Is he the one who made a cunt of himself with Genet?’ It always is. Very nice fella, Nigel. Won’t hear a word against him. He should worry; on £40,000 a year, and enough ‘allowed’ days to bang out a novel for one of the posh houses. Some of these Nigels turn eventually into Nicks, and transfer — without fuss — to London Weekend. But this one is still, quite definitely, a Nigel. He knows how to keep the wine flowing. And we all sit in a formaldehyde line, trading blank-verse anecdotes — like late T. S. Eliot at the Edinburgh Festival. Nobody has actually said anything about the film. What film? We must be auditioning for the Masons. It’s a quick handshake, a peppermint, and back to the office.

On the pavement, the moment before we are cast adrift, Sonny tips us the big wink. The project, he assures us, is ‘on’. We can start mapping the camera angles. Secret signals were, apparently, exchanged across the lunch table. You can read a lot into the way your neighbour turns his fork, or flashes his wine label. We’ll have a production number by the end of the month.

The feeding, from this point, falls on us. The second (working) stage belongs to kitchens. You begin to understand why notes were kept. Motorcycle messengers lacerate the city bearing triplicate summaries: within the hour, the scenes we have written are returned to us, translated into an ersatz and shifty language. A simple instruction, such as: Camera moves from street into synagogue , is inflated into a page of tortuous explanation. A party of school-kids is invented, so that the camera will not have to be switched on without a justification that would stand up in a court of law.

In the old days, the 1960s, it was taxis: an endless circuit of cabs with solitary cans of film, script revisions, hampers. Now there’s more gravitas : we talk to agents who talk to agents (and charge us for the privilege); we talk ‘repeats’, and we talk ‘kill fees’. We’ll have to put a nine-month gestation into this script for an initial payment of — what — £200? See how that floats at the next lunch. We could be scheduled, or we could be looking at some very ‘creative’ expenses.

We have come in from the cold. We have not yet taken the blood-oath, and signed the Official Secrets form, but we do have an interesting collection of phone numbers. And the promise of an actual contract.

II

‘Research’ was the excuse for a day or two walking the labyrinth: markets and breakfasts. Fredrik wanted to call on Roland Bowman, an actor he had met at a party, who was restoring a house in Fournier Street. Roland had staged, in the tragic basement that once held the Hebrew Dramatic Club (scene of the 1887 false-fire panic, and death-on-the-stairs of seventeen members of the audience), a millennial version of Wilde’s first play, Vera; or The Nihilists . He brought out the Rose-Croix ritual that Wilde had coded into the piece. And his own performance, as Vera, in this all-male production, gained the unexpressed approval of his neighbours, Gilbert and George.

Roland was no card-carrying Huguenot. He had been drawn here down a track of dreams. He remembered what the house would become. It was all inevitable, and his talent lay in not opposing the current that was already carrying him along. The ruin was now a valuable property in which he camped with his mother, while he breathed life into a shell of bricks and plaster. He was living far beyond his apparently modest means in keeping faith with this vision. Market forces would conspire, in time, to expel him. But that was the nature of the place. The human element was optional.

At the back of the house was a narrow, walled garden. Roland pointed out the hops he had cultivated, as a gesture of solidarity with the earlier benefactors of this soil, and with the prevailing winds that gifted us with all the odours of Truman’s Brewery: odours you can taste, Whitechapel’s madeleine . Fredrik, of course, had a dissertation handy, culled from the journals of a Quaker brewmaster, asserting that the heady scent of the hops made men drowsy and women lascivious. He knew the Latin names of all the flowers.

We settled on a bench, all of us sharing a notion that this was slightly unreal, a posed photograph. We wanted to arrive at the story that lay ahead, but there was no way of rushing it. Roland was fascinated by his own wrists. He stroked his fingers obsessively down the length of his arm, gesturing, encircling the wrist; as if he could not believe in its delicacy. He is ageless, benign; a chaste Dorian Gray. He moves in clean lines against a plain background. Nothing is hurried. His arms are thin, but a braid of muscle bunches under the short sleeve of his matelot jersey.

He showed us the house: we eavesdropped on his private space. What we relished, we also exploited. Our brief from the Corporation insisted that each minute particular be generalized: it must stand for something, an articulated tendency. If we could not explain it, then it did not exist.

From the first-floor window I looked back over the garden, and north towards Princelet Street; and I was amazed to discover how much of this area was still covert: hidden space, old courts, outhouses, industrial yards tethered in hawsers of convolvulus, protected by hedges of thorn and nettles. The heart of Whitechapel remained in purdah, sheathed in a prophylactic neglect: from the streets there was no hint that this unexploited kingdom even existed. Had I stumbled, after all these years, on a method of painlessly visiting the past?

On the other side of the house, facing the magnificent threat of Christ Church, Roland was in the process of creating a room that would set the key for his entire scheme: the minimal decorations he had so far effected were both ritualistic and meaningful. One wall was covered with a painted backdrop; a Strindbergian victim, whose hair, and silent scream, shakes a liquid jungle of intestinal ropes and vines. She is drowning in fire. This hot flush of expressionist bravado is countered by a pale and handsome fireplace, freshly installed: on its mantelpiece is the Spy cartoon of Oscar Wilde.

Roland was ahead of us. ‘Yes, the fireplace did, in fact, once belong to Wilde,’ he said. ‘And, I suppose, I like to believe that it still does. Sympathizers rescued what they could from Tite Street after the crash. The fireplace passed, for generations, among friends: who could appreciate its value, and its charms, without wishing to obliterate those qualities in a sordid monetary transaction.’Roland was making a speech, and he knew it. He floated upstage from the mantelpiece, so that he could spin, dramatically, on his heel, and allow the sunlight in the window to fluster the red in his hair. ‘I cling to the conceit,’ he continued, ‘that when I’ve finished the job, Oscar will walk in, smoking his blonde cigarettes; ready to accept the sensational role of a character, literally unresolved between life and art. It’s what he always wanted.’