Sinister: A Drop In The Ocean

[P F]

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.












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