Corduroy Mansions

55. The Late Isadora Duncan

As this conversation was taking place between Dee and a reluctant and embarrassed Martin, Barbara Ragg’s thoughts could not have been further removed from vitamin D, polar bears, or indeed colonic irrigation. She was driving at the time, sweeping along the winding road from Rye in her British Racing Green sports car, with a young man in the passenger seat beside her. A cynic, standing by the roadside, contemplating the passing traffic, would have had no difficulty in describing the situation. He would have said, with all the snide innuendo that cynics so effortlessly muster, that here was a woman in her early thirties, prosperous - driving the fruit of last year’s bonus - accompanied by a trophy man a good few years younger. And the cynic would have observed that Barbara was driving, which underlined the status of the young man, who was nonetheless enjoying the trip greatly, a scarf trailing from his neck.

At the beginning of their journey, noticing the scarf, Barbara had warned him of the fate of Isadora Duncan.

‘Remember Isadora Duncan,’ she said as they drove out of the Mermaid Inn’s car park.

He looked at her blankly. ‘No, I don’t know her, I’m afraid.’

The car started down the cobbled street. ‘You wouldn’t,’ said Barbara. ‘She died in 1927. In tragic circumstances that are brought to mind, I’m afraid, by your scarf.’

The young man frowned. ‘You’ve lost me,’ he said.

Barbara explained. ‘The reason I know all about this is because I represented an author who wrote about Gertrude Stein. I’m a literary agent, you see. Anyway, Gertrude Stein, who was an American with a literary and artistic salon in Paris, said “affectations can be dangerous”. She said it when she heard about the death of Isadora Duncan, who was a famous dancer and femme fatale.’

The young man was watching her as she spoke. There was a light in his eyes - the light of discovery that ignites when one encounters for the first time an intellectually stimulating companion. Barbara noticed this light, and responded. Oedipus Snark never listened to her - she could say the wittiest things and he would just ignore her. This young man, by contrast, appeared to be appreciating her, and she felt glad; one might sparkle before such an audience, and she had him to herself all the way to London, and after that . . . Well, it was possible. These things happened in fiction, and if they happened in fiction, then they might just happen in real life; just . . .

She turned the car at the bottom of Mermaid Street, noticing as she did so their reflection in a shop window nearby. Seeing one’s reflection in a window is a reminder of what one is; this is what one is in the eyes of others. And she was a woman in an expensive sports car with an attractive young man at her side. How satisfying.

‘It’s rather a sad story,’ Barbara went on. ‘Isadora was given a lovely long scarf by a Russian artist. She was taken for a ride in Nice in an Amilcar GS - a very nice little sports car of the time - by a very glamorous Italian mechanic, Benoît Falchetto.’

Barbara thought: what it would be to be invited to drive off with a glamorous young mechanic, and an Italian to boot! And one called Benoît Falchetto . . .

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘as they drove off, the scarf which Isadora had been wearing got caught in the back wheel of the sports car. It was made - the scarf - of very strong silk and when it wound round the wheel it tightened round Isadora Duncan’s neck. She was pulled out of the car and bumped along behind until the Italian mechanic stopped. But by then it was too late.’

She glanced at the young man. I haven’t even asked his name, she thought. I’ve picked him up in the hotel car park and I have no idea what he’s called. Bruce? Andrew? Mark? . . .

The young man felt gingerly at his neck, loosening the scarf slightly. ‘Not a nice way to go.’

‘No indeed. Even if it immortalises one.’ Hugging the side of the road, Barbara put her foot down on the accelerator. ‘You know, I’ve always thought that immortality comes at a price. If you look at the career of anybody who’s achieved enough to be immortal, there’s a cost. Neglected family, a relentlessly demanding muse, deep, driving unhappiness - it’s all on the balance sheet.’

‘I wouldn’t want it,’ said the young man.

‘No. Moi non plus.’

They were breasting a blind rise in the road. To the east, the land dropped away into a valley; cattle grazed, a tractor moved slowly across an as yet unploughed field. As Auden observed in his ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, disaster always took place against a background of very ordinary life: Icarus fell from the sky while a ship went innocently on its way, while a farmer tilled his fields. So too, against a backdrop of the quotidian, did the knot of the scarf now suddenly fall apart, releasing a yard of tightly knitted wool in colourful stripes; and, while these ordinary country things were happening in the nearby field, the scarf snaked out backwards, too quickly for any movement of the hand to arrest it, and, by dint of aerodynamics and gravity, found its way to the revolving hub of the sports car’s near-side rear wheel.

It happened so quickly, just as it had happened in Nice all those years ago: the scarf was caught in the hub and wound up immediately, tugging with sudden and brutal force at the young man’s neck. Feeling the unexpected pressure, he opened his mouth to shout, but the sound was blocked by the immediate occlusion of airways as the scarf tightened around his throat. Not that a cry of alarm was necessary: Barbara had seen it happen and immediately slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a halt in a squeal of burning rubber. For a moment she could not believe that it had happened, that the accident she had described had come to pass, as if in neat illustration of some safety lesson.

She grabbed at the scarf around the young man’s neck, struggling to insert her fingers into the tightly wound loops. But she could not get purchase and he was turning red, his face suddenly puffed up. She almost panicked, but did not, because the idea came to her of reversing the car, which she now did, crashing the gears.

It was the right thing to do, even if the right thing may sometimes come too late. To reverse the car is not the solution to an ordinary accident; one cannot just drive backwards, and in doing so bring a broken vehicle to wholeness again. But in such an accident as this, one can reverse and unwind that which is wound up; in theory, at least.