Come Dance With Me

7 Christabel Alderton

22 January 2003. When I got back from Vienna after Sid’s death, Victor, one of my cat-minding neighbours, gave me a recording of ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. He hadn’t yet heard about Sid, he just gave it to me because he thought I might like it. ‘It’s deep,’ he said. When I played it, it was as if the whales and the sea were singing my thoughts and singing the dead. Sometimes Death himself would sing in a very low-frequency whale voice, grunting and growling, and the whale voice of me would plead with him, weeping and wailing in higher frequencies. And all the time the watery deep-sea voices were burbling and plashing all around. After that first hearing I didn’t want to listen to it again for a long time but every once in a while it was the only thing I listened to. Now after all these years I hear it in my head without playing the CD.

I didn’t want this dinner date to be too serious and I had a craving for fish and chips so Elias suggested The White Horse in Parson’s Green. ‘They do cod in beer batter,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ By the time the rehearsal was over it was almost eight so we took a taxi straight there. On the way we talked a little about music. Classical is what he listens to mostly, he said Haydn quartets would be his Desert Island Discs. He remembered people headbanging to Hawkwind and Status Quo and he liked The Rolling Stones, also Portishead and Garbage but that was about it for rock and pop, he’d never heard of Joe Strummer. He likes blues and Thelonious Monk, he likes country and western and he knows a lot of standards but I wasn’t sure how we were going to get through the evening until we started talking about painters. He’s a big Redon user and he has a thing for Caspar David Friedrich. I have a tattoo of a Friedrich owl, wings outspread, perched on a grave marker just above my bottom cleavage. Not many people know that.

The White Horse seemed to be popular with Hooray Henrys and Henriettas. Even on this cold January evening they were stood three deep outside the pub and clogging the entrance, none of them over thirty and all of them loud. ‘There’s a dining room at the back,’ said Elias. ‘It’s fairly quiet there.’ We struggled through the braying and the cigarette smoke, reached the dining room and sat down at a table for two. The other tables were braying less loudly than the people in the bar. There were some crap abstractions on the walls doing some visual braying but they went quiet when I looked away. We ordered the beer-battered cod and pints of Bass and there we were then, at the point where one of the two people says, ‘So … This time I said it, ‘So … Here we are. What now?’

‘Why do you sound so negative, as if nothing good can happen?’ said Elias.

Tell me about negative, I thought. My son Django was four when I took him to Maui with me. It was January, the band had nothing scheduled for a couple of weeks and I wanted to see those humpback whales that come there every year. I’d been having dreams in which I was drowning in the sea while the whales sang all around me but I wanted to see them anyhow. Then I dreamt that Django was in the sea, sinking down, down, down into the darkness. When I woke up I thought, he could fall over the side of a boat. So when we got to Maui we didn’t go out on a whale-watching boat; instead we watched from a cliff and Django fell off the cliff and was killed. He’d be fourteen now and a good-looking boy. ‘Negative?’ I said to Elias. ‘I guess I’m just that kind of person. Tomorrow you can try someone else.’

‘I don’t want to try someone else,’ he said.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked him.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Don’t answer a question by repeating it. What are you looking for with me?’

‘I hadn’t thought it out, Christabel. You started it with that line from “Herr Oluf”; I’m just going from one moment to the next with you and I’ll go as far as it goes.’

‘Brave words. Have you got a video of Vertigo?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Good. After we get out of here let’s go to your place and watch it.’

‘OK, we’ll do that. Any reason for that particular film?’

‘Not really, I just feel like watching it with you.’ We talked some more about Friedrich and Böcklin and Bresdin, had two more pints and coffee, then we left The White Horse and walked to Elias’s place on the other side of Eelbrook Common. Here I was in another January ten years after the one when I lost Django. January weather suits my January mood. I like it when the days are cold and grey and rainy and the nights are early and dark and huddly. The lights on the New King’s Road and on both sides of the common made it seem darker where we were and now it started to rain. Again there was an invisible helicopter near and far, near and far. Behind us the District Line trains rumbled and clacked as shadowy people passed us coming and going on the shining paved paths. Sometimes, I was thinking, everywhere is nowhere and nowhere isn’t a bad place to be.

Elias’s house was enormous, four storeys with a roof extension. ‘Do you live all by yourself in this whole place?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m used to being alone with a lot of space around me. And I’m a big accumulator — books, recordings, videos.’

We got out of our wet coats and towelled our heads dry, then we settled down in the ground floor living room and Elias got us some cognac and lit a fire in the fireplace. By now the rain was drumming on the windows and there was a lot of bleak midwinter going on outside but it was big-time cosy where we were. There were shelves full of books catching gleams from the fire, and china and bronze figures taking the shadows and the light. I had the feeling that Elias’s house didn’t look empty when nobody was in it. ‘Here’s to whatever,’ I said as we clinked glasses.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said.

‘Roll on Vertigo,’ I said. ‘Let’s get suspenseful.’

‘But you have seen it?’ he said. ‘You know how it ends?’

‘Sure, but each time I see it I hope the end will be different.’

‘So you’re a positive thinker after all.’

‘In a negative way. Are you ready in the projection booth?’

As there may still be one or two people out there who’ve not seen Vertigo, I won’t disclose any more of the plot than I have to. James Stewart plays an ex-cop who had to leave the force because after a disastrous rooftop chase he has a fear of heights and gets dizzy when high up. Knowing this, an old friend hires Stewart to shadow his wife because he says he’s afraid she’s suicidal. This is a hoax that draws Stewart into an elaborate murder plot. Kim Novak is part of it but she and Stewart fall in love with each other, which was not in the plan. When he finds out much later how he’s been duped he becomes bitter and cynical.

I’ve given a lot of thought to the Kim Novak character. She’s got a shady past, she’s definitely a bad-luck woman but she’s touching and vulnerable and beautiful and she’s never stopped loving Stewart. Does she deserve a second chance?

‘There are holes in that plot you could drive a truck through,’ said Elias.

‘I know that,’ I said, ‘but what about the Kim Novak character? If you were in Stewart’s place, would you make her climb the stairs in the old mission?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘Are you sure? After all, anything with her was going to end up badly one way or another — she was definitely unlucky’

‘How could I reject her? I fell in love with her because of her self, regardless of her part in the hoax. There was a strangeness about her, she seemed a prisoner locked in the mystery of herself — only love could free her and I was still in love with her, never mind how I’d been used, I wouldn’t care about that. Love isn’t a rational thing. I’d never have made her climb those stairs, never.’

‘That’s a very passionate speech. Have you ever been in love, Elias?’

‘Not like that, not irrationally’

‘Pour some more cognac,’ I said, ‘and let’s look at the shapes in the fire.’