Medusa Frequency

3 The Vermeer Girl

My name is Herman Orff. At parties when people ask me what I do I say I’m a novelist and then they say, ‘Oh, should I have heard of you?’ and I say, ‘I think not.’ Then we both find somebody else to talk to.

My first novel, Slope of Hell (Mumchance Press, 1977), sold 1,731 copies before being remaindered. The Times found the writing ‘a little slippery’; the Guardian noted that the story was ‘a downhill sort of thing’. My second one, World of Shadows (Reedham & Weap, 1978), sold 1,247 copies before the publisher went into receivership. What I do for a living is write comics. I came to that via an advertising agency called Slithe & Tovey where I used to write copy for Orpheus Men’s Toiletries, Hermes Foot Powder, Pluto Drain Magic, and several non-classical accounts. When we lost Hermes I was sacked and so was Sol Mazzaroth the account executive. Soon after that he became Editor in Chief of Classic Comics and that was the beginning of my freelance comic career. Classic Comics became for Sol Mazzaroth the earthen ramp by which he reached higher things, namely his own hardback imprint, the Avernus Press, where he published such rising talents as Boumboume Letunga, Hermione Thrust, and Juan de Fulmé. It was understood between us that my non-comic writing was not quite the thing for the Avernus list; I hewed wood and drew water at Classic Comics but I led my muse into insolvency elsewhere.

Working for Classic Comics wasn’t too bad; it wasn’t all that different from Slithe & Tovey: it was one of many bright and tastefully decorated places in London where people can neither speak nor write English and they say concept when they mean idea. The building was a posh little Bauhaus-style thing in High Holborn with a genuine Calder and a pseudo-Rothko in the waiting-room. Sol Mazzaroth had a big office full of layouts and proofs pinned up on corkboard and a lightbox littered with transparencies. It was better than Slithe & Tovey because I only had to be there when Sol wanted to talk to me about the work or when I delivered the finished adaptation of Treasure Island or Ivanhoe or whatever. After a few years of it I tended to see all speech in balloons and hear all sounds in expressionistic capital letters but that seemed a small price to pay for having the hours of my days under my own control.

Not having done terribly well with my first two novels I thought I might be third time lucky and I tried very hard to write another one but nothing came. Every afternoon I worked on my comics and every morning and night I tried to get a novel started. I could feel that there was life in my head, there were all sorts of things going on in it but nothing that could be made to act like a story for two or three hundred pages. Eight years had passed since I’d finished World of Shadows and so far page one of the next novel hadn’t turned up. I thought of giving up writing but I didn’t know how to do without that rush of panic and well-being that comes when I sit down at the word machine.

The night is my best time. At my lost outpost in Fulham I listen to my Drake R7 shortwave receiver while I work; it’s a proper three-o-clock-in-the-morning radio, a black longdistance machine with two blue illuminated windows and a frequency counter with luminous red numbers. By now the two blue windows have gone dark and only the red numbers light up. As my thoughts appear letter by letter on the screen the voices come in from All India Radio or Radio Moscow or the Voice of Greece or Rias in Berlin or whoever’s transmitting the music I crave at the time. I seldom listen to English broadcasts; I don’t want to know what the words mean — I just want to hear those voices coming from far away in the night, coming round the curving ionosphere and the great globe-encircling miles, night miles, ocean miles where the deep fish glide in the deep, deep dark and the Kraken waits in the uttermost deep with its dark mind wild with the terror of itself and of Eurydice.

I tape a lot of the music that comes in; I seldom get a really clean recording of Bismillah Khan or Tatiana Petrova or whoever it might be but I like to hear the crackling, the twittering and tweetling and whispering, the sudden storms and surges of that particular transmission as it comes to me in the night. Far, far away in the darkness are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak and they’re looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the thousands of great globe-encircling miles, ocean miles in the night, the heave and swell and the deep fish gliding in the dark. And always on the night air sweet women singing in all the tongues of humankind, singing to the accompaniment of strange instruments, strange rhythms in places unseen but existing at this very moment, perhaps with red dust rising on the plains or monsoon rains beating down or snow on mountain peaks impassable. And while I hear those sweet voices singing words that I cannot understand I watch my thoughts appear letter by letter in the green dancing of the phosphors on the monitor screen.

My desk is a clutter of stones written upon and not; seashells, acorns and oak leaves, china mermaids from long-gone aquaria, postcards of medieval carven lions, clockwork frogs and photographs of distant moments. It’s a good desk, there’s a lot of action even when I’m not there. Propped up amongst the stones and clutter are two books open at colour plates of Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl; there are also a postcard of it stuck on the edge of the monitor screen and a large print over the fireplace. Night and day in all weathers she looks out at me from her hereness and her goneness. Even the ageing of the painting seems organic to it; one can see in the reproductions how the reticulation of fine cracks in the paint follows lovingly from light into shadow the curve of her cheek, the softness of her mouth, the glisten of her eyes, the fineness of brow and nose, the delicacy of her chin.

Impossible to know what her look might have been a response to; presumably Vermeer sat down at the easel and said something like, ‘Turn your body to the side but turn your face to me. No, back a little — like that. Hold it like that.’ And she’d held it like that, her face full of questioning and uncertainty. Was there also fear? Fear of what? What had she to fear from him? Was the giant squid in her thoughts or in her dreams? What was her name? Maybe it will come to me, the story of what happened between them. Here it comes, no research — straight story:

THE PAINTING OF HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL

Vermeer when he painted this picture was forty-five. He’d been married for a quarter of a century and had seven children when there sat down in front of him this girl of seventeen. Her name was Ursula; they called her Ursel, Oor-zl. When you say her name it isn’t like saying Miranda for example; it’s a simpler utterance.

Ursel, he used to say in his mind as she went her ways about the house. She was a servant; he paid her money and she lived in his house, slept under his roof. He imagined her lying in the darkness at the top of the house; he imagined the smell of her warmth and the sound of her breathing in the darkness.

When he said, ‘Will you sit for me, Ursel?’ she said, ‘Yes, Mynheer.’ There was no question of getting her to take her clothes off, he wanted her nakedness so much that he couldn’t ask for it, he had to put more clothes on her. ‘Try this,’ he said, handing her the blue and gold scarf. He stood watching as she wound it round her head. ‘Yes,’ he said, hearing the sound of her breathing in the darkness, ‘that’s good. Now turn and look at me the way you did before. Like that. Hold it like that.’

She sat that day and the next and the next while he painted. Looked at her and painted. The look on her face is her answer to his look. That was all that happened.

After writing the above I looked at the back of the postcard of the painting and noted that Vermeer only lived to be forty-three.

I went down to the kitchen and made myself a sardine sandwich. While I ate it I leafed through Personal Computer World looking at the various ads for hardware and software. There were so many software packages for spreadsheets and databases and computer adventure games, why couldn’t there be one called Third Novel?

On my way back to my desk I noticed something lying on the floor by the front door where I always find cards and notices from radio cars and estate agents, carpet cleaners, palmists, and Chinese takeaways. This one was typed on yellow paper, the same kind I use:

ART TROUBLE?

COMPOSERS, WRITERS, FILM-MAKERS –

STUCK? NOTHING HAPPENING? NO IDEAS?

WHY NOT

HEAD FOR IT?

Write orph one

HERMES

Write orph one? There were a Soho address and telephone number. I sat down at my desk, put a stone from Paxos on the HERMES flyer, and looked at the Vermeer girl in the postcard, the two books, and the print over the fireplace. The look on her face always made me think of Luise von Himmelbett who lived with me for two years and left me nine years ago. There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it:

I trusted you with the idea of me

and you lost it.