The train to the coast and the Isle of Wight stopped at an outlying London station where a young woman boarded and sat at the table across from me. I sized up the potential victim of my assault. In her low twenties, very slim and casually dressed in jeans, she took immediate and total possession of the table between us. Marjorie used to be equally cavalier when it came to shared space, and she had similarly tawny good looks, right down to the deep-auburn hair and full, slightly overhanging upper lip that gave them both a look of cultivated melancholy. Except that the girl across the table wore a mop of curls and Marjorie’s hair was straight and long, the resemblance was uncanny: they could have been twins, separated, of course, by forty or fifty years. In the years to come of our best friendship, Marjorie was going to decide to major in Art History. A degree in Art History was of even less practical value and much easier to get than my own degree in English Literature. Not that Marjorie saw things that way. She was a serious girl, very serious, and like the rest of us very, very, quite terribly seriously devoted to The Arts. Marjorie’s ruthless streak would have suited her for a degree in Business Studies had such a vulgar course been open to girls in those days. But it had to be Art History, a course tailor-made for the daughters of the very rich, of whom there were a great number at Barnard College. Among the many things that Marjorie’s father owned was a bank. And needs must.
So close was Marjorie in my memory that when the young girl on the train began turning the pages of a large portfolio open in front of her, I was not in the least surprised to see it contained photographs and pencil sketches of classic statues. She studied them with critical intensity. She twiddled her hair as Marjorie used to do. Still does? I wondered if this one also had a room-mate who helped write her papers? Did she too play Scarlatti sonatas on a baby grand piano? Marjorie’s father gave it her when we moved out of the dormitory at the start of our third year, right after my return from Europe, in fact, and became the first two Barnard girls ever to live off-campus nominally on their own; our flat was always full of company. After a year or so, inexplicably and I begin to think inevitably between youthful best girlfriends, coolness set in; we began to argue, for nearly the last time about a documentary film on the recent bombing of Hiroshima. Marjorie thought the pestilential cloud that rose, puffed up and proud as death, was beautiful; I said there could be no beauty that entailed human suffering. I was wrong. We were both wrong as I had to admit many years later under an airborne inferno in Vietnam, and later still when I sat by my ailing mother’s bed in New Jersey and watched the televised image of a skyscraper down the road being violently converted into September dust.
The stranger turned a page to yet another naked male of marble and scribbled a few words in the margin. She raised her eyes; they were dark brown like Marjorie’s, but lacked the interesting cruelty of my old friend’s quest for beauty and nothing but beauty.
I nodded towards her sketches of male nudes in marble. ‘Dirty pictures?’ I asked.
Her face mimicked a crabby middle age ahead. ‘These’, she said, ‘are not dirty pictures.’
We both sighed and I turned to the window.
Outside, April bullied the countryside. I have never loved early spring, it manages to be both mawkish and acidic, like the lime and lemon sweets my brother and I always left at the bottom of the bowl. Clumps of daffodils on the verge were practically indistinguishable from their plastic replicas. Bare, knuckled branches lay under a haze of sickly green; the sky threatened rain. I returned to the book I had grabbed from the pile at the side of my bed. When it comes to reading on the road I occasionally give in to a weakness for unlikely combinations and impulsively I had packed The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara as perfectly unsuited to the Isle of Wight. What a tender and likeable man was the young Argentinian who fussed over his hairy guerrillas as a father his difficult sons. Meanwhile, the girl across the table had returned to her portfolio. The next time she spoke it was to Daddy on her mobile phone to tell him we would be pulling into Southampton in twenty-five minutes; would he meet her at the station? As she was repeating her request, garbled under a bridge, I read how Che, while bivouacking in the Bolivian jungle, discovered that several tins had been stolen from supplies by one of his hungry men – he had a pretty good idea which one. I glanced at the portfolio on the table, then reread his short sentence of rueful explanation and forgiveness. This time I had to laugh out loud. The few words seemed to me to contain the fact of many matters, I cannot say precisely which or why. But that doesn’t mean I am wrong. The moue across from me, silly moo, was cross and fearful. She’d known it all along: I was a half-crazed old bat who ought to be locked up.
‘Tinned milk’, Che had written, ‘is a great corrupter.’
On my fourth birthday France and Britain declared war on Germany at last, and ever since, my generation has stumbled from one crisis to the next, greater or smaller, always faster and closer as speed of communication puts the Middle East a block away and Africa on the local tramline. Youngsters quite enjoy a crisis because it seems to promise change. The world is always changing for the young. And the world is always ending for the old. The young are bored most of the time. As much as ambition or curiosity or lust, it is the need to outrun boredom that accounts for their frenetic style. As life unwinds behind us and its sheer weight starts to slow us down, we turn round to squint at our memories. Old people are never bored; they are much too busy remembering. To remember, more often than not incorrectly and fantastically, is the final industry of the decrepit imagination. During my father’s terminal dementia, I sometimes sat with him in the day room of his nursing home. Well into his eighties, he still had his teeth and most of his hair; only his wits had left him. He referred to my mother as ‘the woman who brings me food’ and he called me by his youngest sister’s name, Sylvia, but I think he did not mind me there quietly beside him, watching him. I watched once how he ate an apple, chewing thoughtfully and slowly, and I followed the play of original memories behind his eyes. For him that apple was the only fruit. Its small crunch and pop in his mouth enthralled him; he was delighted by its flavour of ephemeral life and his mind was occupied by the hallucinatory images it summoned. Bored? Not on your life, sweetheart. Too busy sampling one more time and for ever the celebrated fruit of Eden.
When I set sail from Southampton for the Isle of Wight it was yet another critical time in British history. An epidemic of foot and mouth disease raged in the countryside. Unchecked by an urban government that models itself after the far reaches of upper management, the virus threatened an ancient agricultural society. A mist of anxiety rose from the pyres of burning carcasses and spread over the land, growing thicker and darker with every mile out of London. Crossings between Lymington and Yarmouth are short and frequent, and I had chosen to travel just before midday on Saturday. Many of the other passengers on the ferry were elderly couples for whom World War Two was only yesterday. They sat in the salon over cups of tea, looking into space, not reading newspapers or speaking very much. The underlying mood on board, deeper than palpable depression, was familiar to me from a ferry I take every year or so to visit an American friend on Martha’s Vineyard; also, there was the weekly boat that used to be the only connection to Ibiza where I lived, once upon a time. This too was a home-going vessel. Most of my fellow passengers knew exactly where they were bound. Their glances at tourists like me were vague, patronising and a little superior. Despite the chilly breeze, several young couples with children gathered out on the forward deck as soon as we pulled away. They kept their backs to the forest of slender masts in Lymington harbour and faced the approaching shoreline where grandma and grandpa were waiting with cakes and a nice cup of tea.
Disembarking passengers walked across a