Flaming Sussex

Both the women ignored me.

‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Ines.

‘No thank you,’ said Miriam. ‘We’re going away for a few days.’

‘Lucky you, my dear.’

‘Work rather than pleasure,’ said Miriam.

‘The two are often the same, in my experience,’ said Ines, waving a hand as she disappeared down the corridor. ‘One of life’s paradoxes.’

‘Well, you’ve met the neighbours,’ said Miriam. ‘Come on then. Come in. Chop chop.’

The first thing that struck me about Miriam’s new apartment was a slight smell. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, though it was a smell so strong that one might almost have put a finger on it. Miriam seemed oblivious.

‘You found it then?’ she asked.

‘Evidently,’ I said.

‘Oh no, no,’ she said, ‘you’re beginning to sound like Father, Sefton. Please, don’t.’ The last thing I ever wanted to do was to sound like Swanton Morley – his manner, alas, was contagious – so I shut up. ‘Anyway, so we’re all set,’ she continued. ‘What do you think: do I look OK?’

She looked extraordinary. Whatever it was she was wearing – Schiaparelli, probably – it was banana yellow.

‘You look … all-encompassing,’ I said, which was all I could think of.

‘All-encompassing?’ she said. ‘Really? That’ll do.’

‘Do I look OK?’ I asked, attempting irony. I was still in my blue serge suit.

She put a finger to her lips and studied me carefully.

‘You look rather like you’ve spent the night sleeping rough, Sefton, actually,’ which was a fair description, since I had in fact spent a few nights sleeping rough – mostly on friends’ floors, but one night on Hampstead Heath, not to be recommended – having decided that it was probably best to try to keep a low profile, after the events at Club Row, and given my increasingly complicated relationship with a number of would-be employers, debt-collectors, former friends and newly acquired enemies. I loved London, but clearly the feeling was not mutual: every time I tried to make peace with the place, I seemed to become embroiled in some imbroglio.

Hence my decision to go back on the road with Miriam and Morley. At least then I’d be on the move and out of trouble. Miriam always told people that I had been saved by her ministrations and my work for her father. This was not in fact true. Basically, between 1937 and 1939 – like Britain and most of Europe – I was perpetually in crisis and continually on the run.

‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Miriam, referring not to her outfit, but to her apartment.

The new place was on Lawn Road, in Hampstead, in a most peculiar building called the Isokon, which, according to Miriam, was a triumph of modern design. ‘Don’t you think, Sefton? Isn’t it a triumph!’

I wasn’t sure it was a triumph, actually, though it certainly crushed and vanquished all the usual expectations of everyday human habitation, so maybe it was.

‘It’s the future, Sefton, isn’t it? Isn’t this what you were dreaming of when you were fighting in Spain? The International? The Modern? The New?’

It was pointless trying to explain to Miriam that in Spain, for whatever high-minded reason we’d gone, we all ended up fighting not for the International, the Modern and the New, but rather for own dear lives and for the poor bastards living and dying alongside us, and that whatever we were dreaming of, it was certainly not clean angles and white empty spaces, but loose women, strong drink and fresh food.

‘Father’s not a fan,’ continued Miriam. ‘He says it looks like the Penguin Pool at London Zoo.’

The Isokon did look like the Penguin Pool at London Zoo. It also rather resembled a cruise ship, and Miriam’s apartment a cabin. Indeed, the whole place made you feel slightly queasy, as if setting sail on a stormy sea. The apartment was so small and so unaccommodating in every way that Miriam had dispensed with most of her furniture. ‘I felt the furniture was disapproving, Sefton,’ she explained, though I had no idea how or what disapproving furniture might be. Every surface in the apartment was flat, white and forbidding. The place looked like a … It’s difficult to describe exactly what it looked like. Years later, with the benefit of hindsight, I suppose one would say that it looked like an art gallery, but at the time it was quite revolutionary even for an art gallery. Art galleries back then were still all oak-panelled and dimly lit. Even now a house that looks like an all-white ocean-going gallery would be unusual. And the Isokon was most unusual: above all, it was a building that took itself extremely seriously. It was a building that was clearly striving towards something, towards purity, presumably – which is always easier said than done. There was a bar somewhere in the place, apparently, and Miriam raved about the tremendous ‘community spirit’ among her fellow tenants, a spirit that found its expression in naked sunbathing, impromptu get-togethers, political discussions and all-night parties. Miriam loved it.

‘You would love it, Sefton!’ she insisted. ‘We all get together and talk about art and literature.’

It sounded absolutely horrendous. Miriam often misjudged me: I had neither the money nor the inclination to become a part of the Isokon set. During those years I may have been debauched, but I have never, ever been a bohemian.

The place was quite bare and undecorated. Not only was there little furniture, there were no shelves, cupboards or mantelpieces for the many flowers, bibelots and thick embossed invitations that seemed to follow Miriam wherever she went. (It was often the case during our time together that we would fetch up in some out-of-the-way village or town, only for gifts and letters bearing invitations miraculously to appear within hours of our arrival.) In the Isokon, this temple to simplicity and stylishness, in which there was no place for anything, everything had been piled on a small round inlaid table in the hallway, which accommodated newly published books, manuscripts, gloves, scarves, jewellery and stacks of the aforementioned invitations. Above the table there was a sort of mobile hanging from the ceiling, which looked to me like a few large black metal fish bones stuck onto a piece of wire.

‘That’s … interesting, Miriam,’ I said.

‘Do you think? I’m trying to write a piece about it for the magazine,’ she said.

‘Woman?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I don’t write for them any more.’

‘But I thought you’d just got a job as columnist?’

‘No, no, Sefton. That was ages ago.’

‘That was about two weeks ago.’

‘Anyway. It was dreadfully dreary. They expected me to write about such terrible frivolities.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Such as?’

‘Accordion pleats or bishop’s sleeves or whatever other silly thing is in fashion.’

‘But I thought you were interested in fashion.’

‘Of course I am, Sefton, but I’m not interested in writing about it. People who write about fashion seem to me about as dull as people who write about medieval patristics.’ Thus spoke her father’s daughter. ‘People could go around in bustles and jodhpurs for all I care, Sefton – and I really don’t care.’

For someone who really didn’t care we seemed to spend much of our time packing and unpacking her clothes trunks.

‘Anyway, you know me, Sefton.’

‘I do?’

‘I have a taste for much stronger stuff, Sefton.’ Which was certainly true. ‘No. I’m now a contributing editor for Axis.’

‘Axis?’ I said. ‘Something to do with mechanics? Geometry?’

‘It’s an art magazine, silly. You must have heard of it.’

‘I can’t say I have, Miriam, no.’

‘Axis? Really?’