Our Dancing Days. Lucy English
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of yellow droplets splattered Don.
‘I’m going to see Geoffrey again,’ he said.
‘Good, I am pleased …’ Splash, red paint.
‘But I can’t take you this time, I’m afraid, you see Hetty wants me to persuade him to go to a hospice.’
Tessa stopped. ‘That’s heavy.’
‘Isn’t it, but the doctors say if he doesn’t he’ll die in three months, if he goes to a hospice he might …’
‘Linger for years … Shit, Don, Geoffrey’s pure, he’s real, it makes me sick when people want to destroy that.’ She splashed black paint angrily. ‘Why can’t people do what they want? Do you think he wants to linger in a fucking-stupid-full-of-morons-hospice?’
Donald laughed. ‘No, he doesn’t, he’s very single-minded.’
‘Shit! That’s too much black, it doesn’t look inspirational any more.’
Don wasn’t listening. He wiped the paint off his shirt. ‘I like Geoffrey,’ he said.
It was September, a year since they’d visited St John’s. Geoffrey was still there, dying, but comforted by his life’s clutter, Molly and Don, who visited him frequently. Tessa and Dee-Dee were established in London. They called themselves artists but didn’t really paint much; they never stayed in one place long enough. They had moved twelve times since the previous spring. They worked evenings in a dismal Greek restaurant off the Charing Cross Road, but this too was temporary. They changed jobs as frequently as their addresses. When they’d first met Don that summer they had been ingénue suburban art-school students, but they were now real hippies, much to the bewilderment and disgust of their parents.
Dee-Dee and Tessa’s families had known each other for years but since their daughters’ abandonment of all that was proper and respectable a certain coolness had developed between the Fulks and the Stallards, one silently blaming the other. ‘If it wasn’t for their daughter and her ways …’ But to Tessa and Dee-Dee their parents were uptight, straight and uncool. What did they know?
Dee had grown her hair long. It was ginger-blonde and crinkly, like a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. She wore round-rimmed sunglasses day and night, dressed in purple with a purple crocheted pull-on hat, and moved in a mist of patchouli. She was always in love, and the latest was called Jeremy. He played the flute, often, and had wild curly hair. He looked like a dissipated cherub and he was only sixteen. They stayed in bed most of the day.
Tessa was leaner, dark and frizzy-haired, which made her look Caribbean, another source of irritation to her parents; in crimson crushed velvet, with her tarot cards and brown gypsy eyes, her intense murals and love of things Eastern, she was known as a freaky lady.
They lived in King’s Cross in the basement of a partially demolished house. Tessa had painted all the walls yellow to cheer it up, but it was so damp she preferred to go out. Her ambition, if it could be called that, was to live in Notting Hill. Don, of course, lived in Notting Hill. His flat was the top floor of a house overlooking a square. He lived in some style. Tessa and Dee-Dee owned virtually nothing – their clothes, some records – but possessions seemed to cling to Don like burrs on a tweed skirt. ‘Doing his own thing’ was working as a porter in Bonham’s, but he also had the knack of finding pieces of junk in Portobello that later turned out to be valuable. His flat was a cave of Indian paintings, hookahs from Morocco (bought last summer), Turkish rugs (the spring before), seventeen different types of tea and seventeen tea-pots, books everywhere and on the ceiling one of Tessa’s murals, ‘The awakening of Consciousness’. It was here she spent most her time.
It was Tuesday but it could have been any day of the week, and what time it was was unclear; Don’s four clocks bonged hours and half-hours intermittently. Outside, yellowing leaves fell in the square. It was misty. Tessa and Dee-Dee were lying on the floor listening to Astral Weeks. The music was dreamy and melodic, Van Morrison’s peculiarly nasal voice felt right for their mood. Don’s room was autumnal too, brown, yellow and crimson. They were sad. Geoffrey had finally died, Don was at the solicitor’s with his father, the will was being read.
‘The Hall will be sold. Who will buy it?’ asked Dee-Dee on the goatskin rug.
‘Somebody,’ said Tessa.
They were smoking dope and were very stoned. Curiously the smell of hashish reminded her of the musty smell at St John’s. Dee-Dee started crying again, she had been doing this on and off since they first heard and that was a week ago.
‘Another time another place …’ sang Van Morrison.
‘Death’s not a bum trip,’ said Tessa; ‘it’s just moving from one thing to another like …’ but she couldn’t think what it was like.
‘We could have gone to the funeral,’ said Dee-Dee.
‘Funerals are for family, anyway we only met him once.’
Then Donald burst in. Tessa and Dee-Dee were stretched out on the floor; the atmosphere in the room was definitely comfortable, but Don jumped over both of them and ran to the kitchen.
‘God, I need a drink.’
‘Don, cool it, what’s happened?’
He sat on the floor and poured himself a cup of whisky.
‘What is it, have you been busted?’
He looked at their serious faces and began to laugh. ‘Geoffrey’s left me St John’s.’
‘Far out!’
‘He has, all of it, the whole bloody place, birds’ nests and all!’
‘Oh, Don!’ said Tessa and Dee-Dee in unison.
He poured himself another cup of whisky.
‘What are you going to do?’ said Dee-Dee, all anxious.
‘Do? I’m going to live there.’
‘That’s wild,’ said Tessa.
‘Like Geoffrey … and there’s money, too, that furniture of his, it’s valuable, it’s not rubbish … and the paintings … Hetty and George got the best things, two Stanhope Forbes and a Morrisot, we thought they were sold years ago …’
‘Oh, Don, what are you going to do?’ said Dee-Dee again.
‘Anything, anything I like …’ and his face took on a familiar far-away look.
So, Don went to Suffolk and Tessa and Dee moved into his flat. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for Notting Hill was the centre of the underground universe. Here were crash-pads for drop-outs, the Electric cinema and a macrobiotic restaurant. Here were happenings, music everywhere and enough marijuana to ensure everybody was stoned. Life at the flat was unscheduled, unrestricted. They woke and slept as they pleased and there were always people, thumping bongos, strumming guitars, dancing, reading poetry and smoking dope. To Tessa and Dee-Dee this was freedom.
Don led a nomadic life between London and Suffolk. He bought a van to ferry Geoffrey’s furniture to sell in auctions. He was trying to raise money to restore St John’s. The builders had started re-roofing, re-plumbing. What he was going to do with the place was a source of endless discussion; a hospice for the dying? ‘but Geoffrey wouldn’t have liked that’; a museum of Eastern Art? That idea lasted two days; a free school ‘where children learned through their own experiences in the here and now and adults could change their perceptions of reality …’ But somehow anything to do with schools meant regulations and planning permission. The idea that was most consistent was to ‘fill the Hall with interesting people all sharing and co-operating …’, but St John’s was only slightly more than a ruin.
The following August, Tessa, Dee-Dee, Jeremy and a person called Edgar Bukowski