FLURRIES

Salted Pleasures was written for an exhibition of art and creative writing curated by artist Roxy Walsh in 2004.

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Salted Pleasures Rob Stone

1. Till sat. And sat, and patted the cushions, and sighed. He brushed dust from his knee, and sat. He shot his cuffs. Calling on his collected dignity, just in case he should be surprised, he looked in a studied way over his shoulder. Fixing on a point to the left of the door, he struck an attitude so as to be able to slip his eye away should it be caught by anyone entering. It allowed him to pretend a civilised and distracted ignorance, if he needed it.

Measuring the room had taxed his reserves. But it was finished, and the long lines and the numerals were in place, candidly worrying the walls with their brightly smiling pin-pointedness. He was nevertheless anxious, and he would liked to have washed his spotless hands. For the lines he’d used a dryish kind of brush, not a stencil or a pen, or any kind of ink, or tape or string. For the paint he’d chosen an elegantly subdued kind of blue, that he had seen before. More of a turquoise really, but not so outspoken. It sat, with its many nuances, over the mottled and muddy relief of the viridian walls. The lines had their own character. As straight, from a distance, as a spirit level permits, from close to they seemed broken and about to leap off in another direction. From close to, they seemed confused. He smiled.

There were few comparable intimacies for him. His folding rule, his brush and small pewter pot, his level and himself and the rooms. He thought of the lines sometimes as little snares, and the numerals some deliciously unfailing arithmetic. This practice of measuring and marking in blue. He could find, hope or dream no terror in it. Only repletions. Sometimes, at this point in the day, he was amused to think of the rooms musically. This one was he thought a major seventh. Not because of any sentimental guesswork, or spiritual insinuation, but because the proportions. The mathematics of this room, and those of the three differently scaled rooms he had completed during the the day seemed to add up here to a major seventh. There was progression, and there were rooms to come, and it may change as he reviewed things, but for the moment, no, he was sure.

It was the coarseness of this realisation of the day was what had unsettled him. He pursed his lips in a vinegary pause: “blues”. The word stepped out in front of him, shook itself, and defied him. Till sniffed. He looked away. Now the size of the numerals were concerning him. Fifteen feet, three and three eigths inches, in numerals precisely two and three quarter inches high, with always the same constant degree of slope, and always the same character and gravity to them. With each line exactly four inches from the floor, ceiling or proximate wall or doorframe, each measurement was exactly two inches above, below, or to the left or right. He had once had a system for this, a set of rules. But these had become ingrained, and now he just knew what to do. He would not like to be called upon to demonstrate his system though, and he did his best not to think of it anymore. Were the numerals too small? No. Perhaps it was that the blue and the green and the unorthodox colour of the floor. Yes, the floor, perhaps the floor, or some relation between the colours. No.

There it struck him. One too many lines. Startled beyond words, his hands started to open and close, scratching slightly on the surface of the rich upholstery. He watched himself rise, and walk towards the wall facing him. He had not actually seen the extra line, not yet. His revising mind, combing through the actions of the day, knew that there were one too many, but he had not yet seen it mentally, nor had he been able to put his finger on it. He stood now only inches from the wall, turned to nothing but the expanding and expansive green. He watched himself pace the room counting, his pale and portly fingers folding into his palm, one by one. He counted what there was to be measured, and he counted the measurements. He watched as he left the room, through doubled doors into the previous room, still counting. He watched as he walked, almost sleeping, through further rooms, and yet further, counting. And, back. It’s not there. It is lost.

Staring unmoved at this, Till thought to rearrange things until things could be settled. The settee, he pulled out of the room altogether, and pushed it up in front of the fireplace of the next room. A small table, he simply shifted by a fraction of an inch to square it off. He moved a rug to cover the spot where the settee had been. He looked up to find the next adjustment. Jo ho he jo he Martial merriment slipped into his soul again. Purpose and order. If this could supress the loss of the line, perhaps he could see a new occupation ahead of him, a role, a suitable place, appropriateness and decorum. He sat again. The rapidity of the calamity, and its resolution had wearied him more than he could imagine it would have. In dozing, he found himself in a street, behind him a building, an industrial building. In front of him a link fence, bellied out by football. Yellow lines on the floor, becoming faint, and grey, washed tar-stained gravel. Unspeakably clean, unused. In his hands two pieces of wood, one damp, almost rotten. Both were bound to each other with tape. Clear tape, enormous and abundant and excessive amounts of clear tape, crinkling with a texture all its own. He started, as he knew he must, to pick.

On the immaculate, pristine, sweetly perfumed kerbstone to his left, sat the tiny, tiny coffee cup, which he had always known to be on its side. It rolled slightly in its saucer, as it always does. He reached to turn the dial to ‘Full’ on the gas fire. Its features were approximate, doll’s house approximate. There was heat, but the flame was painted, maybe some kind of transfer, perhaps. He turned again to his picking. This piece was coming off easily, with a constance and grace rarely afforded adhesive tapes of other times and places. But, no. The tape is holding, just occasionally catching, catching enough to worry one, not that it may break, but that it may put one off to such an extent that it may force one to react in an unthinking way, causing some other action that may lead to some yet other action that may endanger the tape and its integrity. But, again, all is well, and the tape comes away, comes away, comes away. Comes away, comes away, comes away. Oh! No, still fine. Comes away, comes away, comes away. He needed to bundle this, to put it on some kind of reel, to store it and prevent its entanglement with other things – like these numerals, and … he woke.

2. Having hardly lived a hero’s life, his tastes were mild. Boiled sweets and middlebrowed brandies, Schubert and the way the ground becomes rust stained at rural railway junctions. The delicacies of hawthorn in flower. He had an architectural appreciation of Lambeth Bridge and the eccentric vanities of old tweed; though he wouldn’t admit to either of these. He was a nice old man, and becoming in his way. Pompous, misogynist halfwit, he had been called once, and this had stung. But, he could live up to that when he needed to. He feigned, even to himself, an ignorance of the chill pool of malignity that could too frequently surround him, inhabit his gaze.

His ear, and the euphonies of his singing voice were beautiful once, and still so. A rampaging and licentious past was behind him, but only physically. More than once he had caroused, and terrified a villageful of drinkers. Proud now of his old intimidations, he had become content to loudly exercise his wallet before the well-spoken paupers of the classical record-buying fraternities. His delight in assembling and shattering exhaustive collections of French opera sets, or East German recordings of nineteenth century piano repertoire, was almost entirely aimed at belittling the excitement of these others’ wonder at such archival spectacle. Fourteen thousand pounds once spent on a turntable. Fourteen thousand, and still there was a fraction of him which could listen with innocence.

Acquaintances, for there were by now no friends, could recommend him for his skill in showing measured proportion. Though there was no further testimonial for Till, and none that he would value. He refused to admit that he clung to his trade. It was no trade, or a paltry one, and in truth his diffidence turned even toward this single, curiously eroticised pastime. A short brass rule, now redundant given his casual facility with the brush, had been handed to him, with hidden ceremony, by a declining priest. This one material treasure, the one thing of no use, the one thing in his life that supplied him with no tangible leverage, was to him a relic. He had been blessed once with a moment of grace in which he was granted a lofty vantage on the world and its workings, and a sense of presence and providence. This rule was the means by which he could remember. Though the once glistening and tremulous panorama he had envisaged, was now forlorn and dessicated, the regularity and precision of the distance between one and another marked inch, or fraction, warmed him. Having no sense of ease with the practice of presence now, this mnemonic to order was what he sought to write large on the national architecture. Turning domestic purlieus into temples, with an artisans act of measurement, Till sought, with his otherwise clumsy, large and awkward hands, to bring a kind of love to the surroundings of his own cultivated grief.

3. “I was educated in London”. Intellectual ambition, the desire to see himself reflected in acheivement, had no longer any consequence. An occasional fervour of charity, and a studious attitude towards every virtuous thing, became the source of acts of appalling generosity. Instructed by seraphs in giving, he gave violently. Wounding with the knowledges he imparted, bullying with fragments of wisdom unfit for further use, the savage harshness of his instructions for living found their steel in imagined sorrows. “My wife is dead these fifteen years, gone these fifteen years”. Far from a blow, her death had been his perfect spur. Claims of loss were precisely what came, spurred forth. This, here, is the habit. “Tilding, Tilding, she would say”. Manufacturing loss as the place where his life’s meaning could assemble, the lost line was just another, plausibly subtle reprise of the contradictions which held him, constellated. His every thought and action forked by the aching towards prophesy, and a dread of an irresistible appeal to the memorial.

The sanity that remained was preserved by his belief in the commission. The grounding fact of another’s interest rescued him from obsession and delusion. The economics of this tawdry investment, this frail barricade, this faith in the hallucination that his own repute must secure genuine worth for his work, this economics bore with it a confession of spiteful deceit. Happily, he reversed confessions, accusing others of the very crimes he would commit. “I too”, he could begin “have been betrayed”. The expanse of his chest, the darkmess of the moustache, even the very shades of the competing browns he so workmanly wore, each of these spoke of a transparent honour. He was unloaded. He wore conviction with the asperity of biting salts; testing himself as much as the manner of others. Yet he lied. In lending law to the biased, keeping balance for the ineffable, his place, his right to be regarded, pointedly found itself on no principle. He knew, as much as the priest who gave it, that his rule was inaccurate, his measurements improper in ways unknown. Hidden by their revelatory concept, that dominating picture, they would not be tested. The gait, the terrorising acts of giving, his sheer physical volume and the way it was so softly carried, these were his own guarantees. He would not allow himself to know how wrong he had been, could be. Others, they could know of this, he suspected as much, in any case, but the admittance of their complicities, publicly, no, not that.

4. Tilding looked at his palm. Firmly. He turned it away from his face, reached out, and stroked the surface of the wall. He patted, and stroked again. It was equally an intimate and expansive gesture. The sensitivities of his soft fingertips found the dints, and with the smallest movements made the loose, the flaking and the dusty, come off. He measured, and with short scrubs of the brush, the line started to appear, realising a cord that he alone could see, and which those who come after will imagine irrestisible. The conventional erotics of the paint, the fluidity, the coverage, the neatness and permanence, all of these were absent. The rasping of the brush as it fought to leave trace of its passage, was an image of honest toil, for him. The wall and the brush struggling with each other. “Enough!”.

He had long known that the fantastic image of his past, the image that struck him most clearly, and did the most to shade him from him the worst of it, was another’s. “A blurred and uncontrolled chord of ecstasy”. It bothered him that this made him weep. With some esoterically baroque flourish, he returned the brush to its pot. He rubbed one dust dry palm across the other, indicating a pause in a task, and turned to the camera. “The story I am going to tell you is set in the west. Once, on a smallholding in Worcestershire, twelve miles from the nearest town, there lived an engineer with his young wife and their two children, as well as those from his former marriage, two boys, one in his late teens, the other in his early twenties. The first wife had been the daughter of a much loved colleague. Plain in many ways, she had decided that her sons should be called Cassius and Rafe. The boys’ stepmother was, rather surprisingly, a different person entirely. Of a vivid turn of mind, she had called her children Lulubelle and Hargreaves. The family didn’t keep animals, not even pets, and there was a woman who came in twice a week to look after the youngsters, whilst their mother worked as an architect. Or rather, while she tried to find a paying client for her work as an architect. She spent much of her time polishing plans and proposals she had been working on these past fifteen years.

The house had first belonged to an itriguing, one might say fabulous woman, Beryl, who had married a wounded soldier on his deathbed immediately after the great war. Rural, but never agricultural, she had built this small, unsturdy house. Over the years she had added to it, as a distraction from the continuing guerrilla actions from her dead husband’s complaining family. With outbuildings and additions, and heating systems, one supplanting another over time, the house the engineer bought from her was something of a congeries. It was large, actually it was far too large. At the bottom of a steep incline, maybe three hundred yards away and through a delapidated orchard, was a trickling road, that would soon become a major highway. The smaller road that led to it from the house, was as badly troughed and rutted as it might have been a hundred years ago. In fact, a tank had been driven up there during the second war, and ruined its newly macadamised surface, leaving only refuge for puddles and the dashing scuts. Whoever lived here felt some kind of proprietorial and paternal relationship to these, the most eatable of all rabbits. It was May, and the atmospheric congestions of the cities had brought out the reviled workers in their droves. The engineer’s wife, with her hand on her hip and a lip bitten in pale contempt, watched as they drifted to and fro, in twos and tens, hunting one then another farmer’s stall, buying strawberries and eggs and the produce of an already tiring spring. Sometimes she would snare and sell the rabbits to them, causing upset in the house.

Looking out from the room that she was proud to call her study, she called to Cassius and Rafe. She asked them to take a turn at cleaning the farm machinery, indolent now as it was. She was careful too, to ensure that it was Rafe and not Cassius who took care of any technical repairs. The rents afforded by these machines were the mainstay of the domestic economy. Naval engineering in this the most landbound piece of England was a trying life to maintain. And, Rafe was so much more adept than Cassius. On a ragged arrangement of flags, outside the kitchen, Lulubelle and Hargreaves played at harbour. Engineer and architect had easily and entertainingly contrived a small boat on wheels for their children, and Hargreaves hauled on the rope attached to the boat which contained his sister. “We are there Splash, splash, it is the sea. We are there!”. The engineer smiled the kind of smile that he should whilst watching his children’s inventions, and moved off to his own place to stare at the heap of drawings on his makeshift drafting table. The extension to a dock in Plymouth. He had returned from there only a week ago now, despondent at the scale of the job, the truculence of the site, and the remuneration. Yes, the remuneration. Hardly the right word for the imbalance it described. Out through the window a single brilliant red flower, a poppy, or a peony perhaps, seemed to tear a small hole in the the constancy of the green behind it, and to pour something delightful into the world, like a perfume seen. Then came the squeal, and the thundering of feet as his wife came down stairs, and the enormously resounding smack, followed by the queasy silence as Hargreaves, stubborn once again, refused to respond to such an unjustified personal outrage. Lulubelle bawled, ignorant of motherly coos and clucks. The graze, gained in too enthusiastic a jump from the boat, focused the attention of all to her knee. Hargreaves came away. Cassius caught his eye.

Her architectural gift was particular. Across a long and roughly kept lawn was a small brick building. Twenty or so years ago now, Beryl’s brothers had been found there, one cuddled to the other, both quite dead. It was in its the building’s recent transformation that the architect had found the limitations of her stepson. The building had been dark, too far recessed, with too few windows. Its depths collected dirt and decay. Her scheme, rather beautiful, was to cut the building in half, and to use the revealed joists in an ingenious way, to make a glazed wall. Cheap, striking and effective. “Firmenesse, commoditie and delight”. She winced at the glibness of a phrase that buried months of thought. Cassius was the only one who spent any time there, and how much time. He gathered horseshoes. Avoiding the habit of nailing them to walls and doors, he had a fondness for their form. Their great size, their gainliness, their strength. He cherished their irresistible authority. They went where they went, all else accomodated them, yielded to them, or bruised. His own great hands and feet, almost uncontrollable then, had broken too many panes, wrenched too many timbers for his stepmother’s concentrating satisfaction. They spoke very little now, and though the building was perfected, eventually, in all respects, and to that testing satisfaction, she felt the project had been sullied. It was neverafter the simple, decisively elegant solution that she had dreamed. Cassius placed his own booted feet on the horseshoes. He let his fingers taste the the marvellously crude indelicacy of the rusting iron. Sometimes he struck out with one, unexpectedly, to complete and convincing effect.

5. Hargreaves and Cassius sat. The similarity of their physical demeanours sang out. The blow which killed Rafe, which laid such a deep, narrow dent in his skull, could hardly have been surprising. They had taken to arguing, and from playfully boisterous rowing, the undercurrents were starting to find themselves. Cassius realised, but could now lay his finger on the reasons for his dislike of his brother. Rafe was deaf to the nuances, the doubling meanings, the exactingly maliciously way in which Cassius could articulate himself beyond the merely violent expulsions required by argument. His talent for exquisitely penetrating acidity, was lost on Rafe’s easier way. But, the brilliance of the words were taking Cassius to places that he had not yet imagined. Fast-moving, agitated, scintillating, and not wholly unterrifying.

The blood on the grass, and the droplets on the leaves of the rose bush, left as Rafe reeled through the clear- aired afternoon light, was unsurprising. The way that the red sat against the communing greens, and struck up a conversation with the vividly darkened patch of sky, that would soon sunshower all away, with the promise of a rainbow; these things were so still. They were so precise, so very so. They seemed more than the artful accidents of rage. There seemed to be a measured purpose, an unfolding if mysterious logic. It was with this diagrammatic reality that things became unsurprising. It was unsurprising, for instance, when, too late to the scene, the engineer closed his giant hands on his youngest son’s throat; and he looked distracted, as if he were thinking of something else, something higher. It was unsurprising that Hargreaves should have such a beatific smile, and that he should not struggle too much to breathe. It was unsurprising too, when the engineer held Cassius to him, and called him “Son”, again. “Jump, said the mammy fish, we jump, said the few. Your new trousers and shirt, son. You’ll need these clean. Go and speak to your mother”.

6. In his worn, dark, plain grey suit and his brown heavy brogues and thickly rumpled faun socks, with his great legs splayed, and in the middle of the lawn, some way in front of the rebuilt summer house, Till sat.