Memories. A number now have dived for them and laid them before us here – a good place to keep them, the darkroom of the ink polaroid, the site where all the ladders start. Mine is very unimportant, in a way, but it has grown more important to me. It was perhaps the last time that I spoke to Liz Daplyn. April 2005; I am dawdling away precious time in rewriting an old essay on George Orwell that has never seen print’s daylight. Late afternoon, 4 or 5, and I have printed the latest draft, to read and correct on paper. I need some cash to buy myself a cheap cup of coffee to accompany that task. I must traverse Russell Square to get it. I cross the civilized pavements & tame zebra crossing, enter through the metal gates, head down the paths between the grass, beneath the trees. At the far side, heading toward the way out, the sudden stun of seeing her. Wow – cor – hello. I have never met her here before, though I’m here often enough. Perhaps she could say the same about me. I think she raises a famous eyebrow, perhaps forms one of those expressions to which Mr Moore has referred, in asking what I am up to, as we stop. I tell her about my Orwell essay – probably I am full of the thought of it; I think I rapidly tell her the whole story of having written it once, trying to rewrite it and make something useful out of it, rather than see it go to waste; and even how I am now fetching some cash so I can reread it properly. It should not be a very interesting tale for her to listen to: I don’t mean to inflict an excess of dullness on her, but somehow the whole thing is needed, if I am to mention any of it. I reckon she offers a few more expressions, widens her eyes to show interest, even utters the odd musing noise of comprehension. But what about her – where is she going? To the gym, she says. I know what my response to this must be: the same as any time anyone tells me they’re going to a gym: Oooh, dear – blimey – intake of breath – that’s not a good idea – gym, eh? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gym – not since I was about 15, anyway. She agrees: I think her words may be akin to ‘Yes, it’s terrible, isn’t it?’. Madness, this going to the gym. From University College Hospital, this is, that way. Oh – where (it springs to mind, as these things always do, seeking to knit themselves together) – where George Orwell spent his last days! - Did he? – I think she is interested. Does she, in fact, show the semblance of a remembrance of this fact herself? – Yes, I say – those last days when he was producing public announcements of how not to read *Nineteen Eighty-Four*. (And to this day I have not checked again the details – so I will do it now. Orwell’s last published letters, at least in my 4-volume set, are from UCH, the Gower Street site as it happens, October 1949. ‘I am getting married very unobtrusively this week’, he says in the penultimate, and in the last, ‘It was so awfully kind of you both to send me that beautiful box of crystallized fruits, & then on top of that for Mary to send me those packets of tea’. He died, Malcolm Muggeridge said, on Lenin’s birthday. A fine line stands out for me from Victor Pritchett’s obituary: ‘He has gone; but in one sense, he always made this impression of the passing traveller who meets one on the station, points out that one is waiting for the wrong train and vanishes’.) Our encounter lasts little longer than this. I can imagine now her blithe glance, her easy eyes, as she departs the way I have come. But in some queer way it lifts me. There is the sheer energy generated by a chance encounter – one with a friend in a semi-professional context, with a pop fan on the verges of the working world; a buzz lingers of the unused electricity left over from the meeting. There is her presence, her character, her distinctive existence, with me a moment then gone. Perhaps a little sweetness surges round my task, from having told her about it. For here is something I will remember her by: the way that, even during my perhaps wearisome narrative about Orwell, her interest does not seem to waver. It is not so much that the topic interests her – though perhaps it does, slightly, at least for a moment; I would like to know now, some day, how much Orwell she ever read, or whether she ever read *Coming Up for Air* (1939). It is rather that she is prepared to be interested, for now, for my sake – not patronizingly or with any fabrication, but with an inner spring of sympathy. Perhaps the best word for what I find in her is just kindness: she looks, listens, talks, kindly. Likewise, she is in no hurry, I think, to be gone anywhere: she strains at no leash. She has somewhere to be, but she is more than happy to stand and talk to me. They are such small things, I know – but they do not go unnoticed. When someone dies, people say and write the best things they can think about them. (He was a fine musician, a yachtsman, a man of parts. His lasting achievement…) That is understandable; more, perhaps it is right and good – though the sad thought remains that if all these things are true, it is a pity many of them are not often enough said during life. But while it is death that brings me to call back this memory and say these things, it has not invented them; I noticed those qualities in her at the time, at the moment, in the backwash. Surprisingly, a supplement exists to this most minimal of tales. On a messageboard Liz remarks on our meeting. I get the cash, buy a cup of coffee, read my essay and scratch corrections and doubts over it. The next day I send it off to a journal in the dim hope of publication. I don’t want nothing to come of all this work, however poor its result. Their website says they will get back to potential contributors within 3 months. It is Tuesday 5th July that I get a reply, which really surprises me: a referee has recommended publication; they don’t even ask for any changes. Probably I have escaped lightly, enjoyed a stroke of luck. But in any case, here is the result of what I was doing that day, that moment I met Liz Daplyn. Something, for once, has come of it, gone right. I wish now that I had e-mailed her and told her. If I had met her again, that night, or the following weekend, and talked, I know I would have told her about it. Of course, she would not have been interested. But in a way, she would have been interested, for the reasons I have tried to describe. I walk through Russell Square again and think of her; like others I am jolted every time I see her picture or her name in print; I even walk the same way for the same old reason, still on the way to finalizing that Orwell piece once and for all. I send it off for the last time, a final version, the day she is buried; then I walk to her wake and hear about the afternoon. I stand outside the Artillery Arms, on the pavement on a sweet evening, with two Aston Villa fans talking about the 1982 European final. One of them is Sister Disco, speaking with slow thoughtfulness about things that have been on his mind, the last couple of weeks. I am very surprised when he turns to me and says: - And the other thing that I keep thinking about is you meeting Liz in Russell Square. I wonder exactly why. Perhaps it is the momentary nature of the encounter, its randomness in a world of random life and death, its triviality in our trivial lives. Perhaps it is because it is Russell Square – and only a few hundred yards from where I meet Sister Disco myself, a month after I meet Liz D. Perhaps it is about connections – how even such a tiny one confirms the web of connections that exists between us, a little like what Virginia Woolf stretched for in that best of all Bloomsbury books: ‘And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had already lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept’. (I flick through the whole book, seeking such moments, and like David Thomson I marvel at it again.) My own thread is thin; I must end before it breaks. Well, I tell Sister Disco, I was thinking about posting about that day, trying to remember it properly, set it down. – You should, he says. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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