Lines and Squares: London, 20.07.12

Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. If you chase that line, it will retreat from you at the same pace you set. Heart pounding, air burning in your chest, you’ll pursue. Only humans see that line as an actual place. But like love, you’ll never get there. You’ll never catch it. You’ll never know.

from The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

i

London is alternately clear and hunch-shoulder drenched in fine rain. A week ago I arrived and left spritzed with clinging mists of it in my hair but now the temperature has risen and the girls are defiantly wearing sleeveless dresses and sandals; the air is foggy with plane tree spores which settle in clustered corners of the pavement with sycamore leaves.

We stay at my parents’ apartment in Westminster. If you stand on the roof terrace with the bamboo leaves rustling behind you, you can look across the dome of Tate Britain next door, across the grey river to MI5 and the red London buses crawling over Vauxhall Bridge. Our street runs parallel to the embankment. I like this area of London so much; its microcosm of quiet, leafy, historic streets, quintessential mansion flats and, across the road, 1930s chequered edifaces of Lutyens buildings, all red brick and stucco and pavilions. It’s a goody-goody neighbourhood and at the same time, faintly salacious – something to do with those glistening lobbies and art deco staircases, or the smoked mirrors, perhaps.

Westminster is London in all its satcheled, waxed, lace-upped, pony-tailed glory. Home to Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster, Downing Street, I always find the indigenous characters on the streets here resemble characters from children’s literature – it has become a game I play when I’m here, like making shapes out of clouds – the weary father and banker is Mr Banks from Mary Poppins, the toothy cabbie, Enid Blyton’s Moonface, the foghorn-voiced proprietor of the Regency Café with the 1950s Formica tables and the best English breakfast in Westminster village, Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull.

If only I could, I would like to write a novel about the two distinctive types of elder Westminster wife – the Mitford-esque, neat, pleated, pearled category in Chanel pumps and expensive crepe and the rangy, tall crow-like creatures charging out of Pimlico tube in stained, 1970s Laura Ashley, accompanying their husbands to the Commons – not so much walking as flapping alongside with an expression that spells plainly that they can’t wait to get back down to the country house and their dogs. One day I follow a woman from Smith Square along Lord North Street, past the house where Lawrence of Arabia lived while he wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Her husband is shorter, red-faced and balding, a Tory MP, perhaps, in an expensive navy suit and tomato-red tie. The wife is wearing a heavy cape, just like Noel Streatfield’s Great-Aunt Dymphna – I could imagine she might break the speed limit in a rather grand, rudely shabby car shouting ‘road-hog’ at anyone who dared to pass her by, eat toadstools for supper and bark poetry in automatic response to questioning.

ii

My sister and I go to Gordon’s wine bar and then the Charlotte Gainsbourg gig at Somerset House, standing in the cobbled quad drinking cold, sharp white wine and feeling the music in our throats until it is dark. She sings some of her father’s songs in a gauzy white shirt under which her skin looks so translucent in the lights that you can make out every slender rib. My sister and I fall in love with her without the slightest hesitation. Later, we meander home along Whitehall, past the Cenotaph, towards Parliament Square. I have Lines and Squares by A.A. Milne going around and around in my head like an unwanted song: Whenever I walk in a London street,/ I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;/ And I keep in the squares,/ And the masses of bears,/ Who wait at the corners all ready to eat/ The sillies who tread on the lines of the street/ Go back to their lairs,/ And I say to them, “Bears,/ Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”

Big Ben chimes midnight, my pale ballet slippers slap the pavement. There are shadows on the twisty-turny cobbles, dim lamplight, the smell of hot streets and alchemy.

iii

We are home on John Islip Street and climb the steps to the reception of our building, mute with tiredness. It is always hotel-quiet here, a steadfast-ship, the heat from the engine room creaking through the radiators even in mid-summer, flowers on the console table of every landing. The porters wish you a good evening, nod good night, good morning (with a wink). I would quite like to move in here myself, I think – I love that you can take them your shirts and, for £1.60, they will wash, starch, press and deliver them back to your door within 12 hours. I love the plush red-carpeted corridors, the smell of wood polish, taking the lift to the eleventh floor and lying in bed side-on to the skyline, watching the lights twinkle and go out across London.

I fall asleep instantly and dream that I am writing letters to the man I am in love with; I write letter after letter until I am old and have a grey chignon. They are not about anything in particular, just iced oranges and a scrap of a poem and how I am currently obsessed by going to North Dakota or Roman food. And then my dream-self pulls on my old boots and walks down a dirt road on a hot night before sunset, eating cannoli siciliani. Such a very good dream.

Saturday

And then the perfect Saturday at home: waking late, a short run and a long shower and idling away a whole afternoon cooking a hearty peasant soup, chicken stew with green olives and a tray of vanilla flapjacks in my tiny kitchen wearing Mum’s denim apron. Splurging on buffalo mozzarella from the Italian deli on the corner. Hand-washing my cashmere sweaters. A rose face-mask. The Financial Times. Then watching Roy Orbison‘s Black & White Night concert on BBC iPlayer with fingers sticky with balsamic and molasses. (And then watching it again.) There are some days you wish would never end.

Summer, Lately

A damp squib of a summer; the soundtrack rain and windscreen wipers. A summer of mercurial, bruised skies and spates and lamplight. It seems to be dark all the time, dimmed by heavy cloud, everything indistinct in the incessant, melancholy-blue light.

As though the climate wants to persuade us how varied rain really can be, how versatile, we’ve had every kind of affirmation – warm mists, torrential downpours, storms that scurry away as hastily as they came, gathering up their clouds like skirts, tantrum-y flurries, thundery mid-afternoon squalls. But it feels like displaced weather, somehow, ectopic – the drizzle in bright sunlight, the March-cold evenings followed by airless, effervescent nights. I’ve been sleeping fitfully, waking an hour or so before dawn with the duvet kicked to the end of the bed and my hair sticking to my neck. It feels very lonely at this hour, very still, but for the subdued sound of the wind sucking at the calico blind.

It’s the year of the trenchcoat, the Aquascutum mac, explosions of English rose-bushes, bicycles skidding on sodden petals. Newspaper articles droning on about the Gulf Stream, and how we’re on the wrong side of it, stuck; the nation collectively praying that next week we will somehow be dislodged into a dry-as-bone heat-wave and be able to wear our suede shoes again. There have been too many duvet days, too much smudged mascara and bringing the washing in still damp. And I’m in a rut. I’ve worn Wellingtons more than heels this summer – the gorgeous sandals I bought in New York in the April heat too precarious on the oil-slick slippery cobbles – successions of destroyed ballet pumps landing in the bin. So, it’s Wellingtons, a Barbour and my Dad’s big, baggy cashmere sweaters and my hair in a bun, because it’s so Hermione Granger-style fluffy from the rain. There’s a constant accumulation and mislaying of umbrellas, odd makeshift headscarves and garments drying out over radiators. I receive the list of titles for my next book club and choose two from the watery themed suggestions: both are named The Flood, a novella by Emile Zola, the other a novel by Maggie Gee.

On Monday, my sister and I walked home from work through the grey crescents of Park Town and tried to imagine (squinting, because that’s the only way you can really deceive yourself into believing it) that it was a warm, golden summer’s evening and that the sunlight was dappled and our skin was brown and freckly. Instead, the pervasive mood of winter has never quite dissipated this year – we’re still in that shivery, dark ale, log fire, thick sock state, still wanting to drink hot chocolate and buy knitwear and take hot showers after the shipping warnings. We’re projecting our forecast hopes onto autumn and patiently going to spend the next couple of months learning to bake and cooking hot suppers from Sophie Dahl’s recipe books – aubergine parmigiana, warm peaches with cinnamon cream, sausage and mash, bowls of steaming lemon-y buttery curly kale. It’s steamed-up windows, curling up and watching a long film kind of weather – slow, pensive films: Lost in Translation, I Capture the Castle – films where the protagonist is bored and sulky too, and spends a lot of time distractedly gazing out of the window.

But then again, this summer, the clammy Jubilee celebrations, dank Wimbledon, rained-off Sports Day; it’s all so terribly British, you can’t help but shrug and inwardly feel faintly affectionate about it – outraged, exasperated but at the same time amused by the sheer gloominess of it all. It’s so nostalgic, so familiar – the soggy cucumber sandwiches, the mud, waterlogged party dresses, the sardonic comments in marquees. You can get used to this capriciousness, this ducking into cafes in the mid-afternoon darkness, dashing hither and thither and changing shoes – because it’s exactly what you miss about home, when you are away – that glorious, glowering sky, sitting in a Landrover with a thermos-flask of tea, the smell of damp woodsmoke, fields of cornflowers. And if it wasn’t raining, we’d have one less thing to grumble about - which would be a shame. The English do that so well.