Metroland Read Online Free Page A

felt a bit like those eighteenth-century physicians who combed battlefields and dissected fresh corpses to track down the seat of the soul. Still, some of them believed they’d got results; and there’d been that Swedish doctor who weighed his terminal patients, hospital bed and all, just before and just after death. Twenty-one grammes, apparently, made the vital difference. We didn’t expect any weight changes at the Gallery, but we thought ourselves entitled to something. You must be able to see something. And, at times, you did. But more often you found yourself noting extrinsic reactions, as a weary file of name-gloaters, school-sneerers, frame-freaks, colour-grousers, restoration loons and topographers trooped by. You got to know the quizzical chin-in-hand stance; the manly, combative, hands-on-hips square-up; the eyes-down-on-the-booklet position; the glazed XII-down, XIV-to-go trot. Sometimes, we wondered if we were any the wiser.
    Eventually, we were driven reluctantly to testing one another. This we did at Toni’s home, in what we judged to be laboratory conditions. This meant that for pictures, we thumbed in earplugs; while for music, we bound our eyes with a rugger sock. The experimentee would be given five minutes’ exposure to, say, Monet’s ‘Rouen Cathedral’, or the scherzo of Brahms PC2, and then consider his response. He would purse his lips like a wine-bibber and pause reflectively. You had, after all, to axe away all that form-and-content analysis stuff they taught at school. We were after something simpler, truer, deeper, more elemental. So, how did you feel, and what changes would happen if you continued with the prescription?
    Toni would always answer with his eyes closed, even after a pic. He would frown until his eyebrows met, wash a quiet ‘Mnnnnnn’ round his mouth for a bit, and then deliver:
    ‘Skin tension, mainly in legs and arms. Thighs rippling. Exhilaration, yes I think that’s right. Aspiring thorax. Confidence. Not smugness, though. More a sort of firm bonhomie. Up to an amiable épat, at least.’
    I’d note all this down in our ledger, on a right-hand page.The left already contained the source of the inspiration: ‘Glinka, R. & Lud. ov. Reiner/Chi SO/RCA Victrola; 9/12/63.’
    It was all part of our drive towards helping the world understand itself.

5 • J’habite Metroland
    ‘Rootless.’
    ‘Sans racines.’
    ‘Sans Racine?’
    ‘The open road? The spiritual vagabond?’
    ‘The bundle of ideas wrapped up in a red spotted handkerchief?’
    ‘L’adieu suprême d’un mouchoir?’
    Toni and I prided ourselves on being rootless. We also aspired to a future condition of rootlessness, and saw no contradiction in the two states of mind; or in the fact that we each lived with our parents, who were, for that matter, the freeholders of our respective homes.
    Toni far outclassed me in rootlessness. His parents were Polish Jews and, though we didn’t actually know it for certain, we were practically sure that they had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto at the very last minute. This gave Toni the flash foreign name of Barbarowski, two languages, three cultures, and a sense (he assured me) of atavistic wrench: in short, real class. He looked an exile, too: swarthy, bulbous-nosed, thick-lipped, disarmingly short, energetic and hairy; he even had to shave every day.
    Despite the handicaps of being English and non-Jewish, I tried to do my bit in a Home Counties sort of way. Our family was small, but there was enough tepidity of feeling to effect a widish diaspora. The Lloyds (well, our Lloyds, my father’s Lloyds at least) came from Basingstoke; my mother’s familyfrom Lincoln; relatives skulked incommunicado in several counties, lying low at Christmas, turning up with sulky regularity at funerals, and, if pressed, at weddings. Apart from Uncle Arthur, who lived within Sunday-afternoon distance, they were inaccessible; which suited me fine, as I could pretend they were all