Always nothing
My father had just died and I found myself homeless in London in the erly 90s, because my landlady sold the house I was living in coincidentally at the same time I was away in Cheshire. I wanted to come back to London, and it was winter; on the cusp of winter.
My landlady, Mabel Calloway, was a writer of History books, mainly for children, and a historical tour guide in the middle east. She and I were pretty close when I was living with her, and that autumn she wanted to help me for a while at least do what she could to make up for the fact that I found myself in such a precarious position.
Mabel was roughly 51 at this time but looked good for her age with bobbed blonde grey hair - had a touch of glam, and was used to the finer things. She was widowed. She went to a dinner party one night and found herself seated next to a 38 year-old corporate lawyer named David Black.To her surprise and general delight, he hit on her and they became an item. I met him and thought he was quite agreeable. I was 23 and he probably should have been wooing me but I didn’t know much about the world at this point, although I had had one very serious relationship.
The story emerged that David had once been married to the feminist academic Peggy Reynolds. She left him for the writer Jeanette Winterson, despite not being gay on the outset. Jeanette Winterson writes eloquently of their affair in her book Written on the Body.
So that autumn, Mabel and David decided to take a holiday, and Mabel arranged for me to stay in his house in Thornhill Square in Islington, while they were away.
It was a very grand square. I had visited a lot of grand squares in Islington and Mabel’s house there where I had previously lived was 4 or 5 storeys - albeit not in a square but in the Angel end of the town, near the canal and the Eye Hospital. Thornhill Square was full of much more imposing terraces, and David’s house was enormous.
It was so Victorian. I have to say in hindsight that I hated the house. It was too big and he had obviously sourced a lot of massive mahogany Victorian antique furniture to master the vast rooms. It was in mint condition but it was gloomy. It was not a place for children like me and my friend Nina, who stayed in it while Mabel and David were away.
We sat by a roaring fire in one of the living rooms, and drank some wine and smoked some cigarettes. It was the high life for us, but it also felt ominous for me because it was so big and I didn’t know what to do with myself in such a big house with no people in it. And I wondered if David felt like this too because he lived his whole life there all alone and it must have felt very huge and empty as it did to me then.
Nina and I drank some more wine and we didn’t watch tv or anything but stared into the fire, the light and the flames and we clung to the fire because it was warm and cosy and we were small and light and young in such a big house. We had a bit of a laugh but it was dark outside and then we heard a noise. It was quite a big noise and it came from downstairs. And we had been drinking but not so we were plastered or anything. What was that I said and Nina said I don’t know. Shall we go and investigate?
So we went downstairs and there was nothing and no one there. But there was scaffolding on the house because David was having some work done and we weren’t sure whether the sound had come from there. Long story short we ended up calling the police.
I expected a small police car would show up with a couple of coppers, but no. Troops of police arrived in a big van and started swarming around the house, up and downstairs, climbing all over the scaffolding and all over the house searching for something or someone awry. Nina and I just let them get on with it but there was nothing to find; it was just a noise - a random noise in the night that always happens when you are in a house by yourself, and you don’t know what it is that made that noise but it is always nothing. And I wondered what was more intimidating - confronting a lone burglar with a stick or a bit of lead piping like in Cluedo or the police in their stuffed up, tightly buckled and braced uniforms and their batons aloft all scrambling all over the house.
At length the police went and we were by ourselves again. And I thought I would sleep in that bed, the bed that Jeanette Winterson talks about in her book where she and Peggy do it one day.
It is a sleigh bed. They are quite common now but this one was antique and they weren’t all that common then. Back in 1993.
And I climbed in and the sheets were freezing and tightly packed next to the mattress and it feels like you are pushing your leg into an envelope or something - your leg is a letter stubbornly refusing to slide into a large white envelope. But it is a nice feeling when it is cold and tight and the warmth of your body soon heats it up and then you feel supremely comfy. And you fall asleep.
But I don’t fall asleep. I feel scared and a bit drunk and it is dark and foreboding.
And I can see Jeanette and Peggy fooling around like chamber maids in Victorian times, mucking around making beds for the gentry that used to live there. And they get a bit frisky and then they fall around the bed again and someone touches someone and then the next thing they are in the bed touching. And I think about Nina in the other room. I am not a lesbian and much prefer men but Nina is really beautiful and I would fancy her if I was a bloke, and I really don’t fancy her - I truly don’t but I can’t help but think about it. Because I am in the bed. Where they do it in the book. The very same bed. That I read about. And the chamber maids are laughing and mucking around wearing pinnies and have busks and their boobs are spilling out of their corsets and the bed, the bed.
And then I fall asleep; and then it is morning again.
Another grey dawn.
