Absolute Beginners (17 page)

I wanted to broach this photographic topic, but the fact was, I found V. Partners rather paralysing. He was so cool, and polite, and sarcastic, and gave you the impression, so much, that he just didn’t believe in a damn thing – not anything – so all I could find to say to him, after a while, was, ‘Tell me, Mr Partners, what is advertising
for
? I mean, what
use
is it?’

‘That,’ he replied immediately, ‘is the one question we must never pause to answer.’

We’d now stopped outside a classified building in the Mayfair area, and he said to me, ‘I’ve got some papers to pick up. Would you care to look inside?’

I can only describe the atmosphere of the joint by telling you it was like a very expensive tomb. Of course, all the staff had left, and the lights were dim where they ought not to be, which made it all a bit sepulchral,
but it did look, as a tomb does, or a monument, like something made very big by people who want to prove something that they don’t believe in, but desperately need to. Vendice’s office was on the second floor, all done in white and gold and mauve. The papers were laid out on the table in coloured folders with perspex covers, and I asked him what their contents were all about.

‘About Christmas,’ he told me.

‘I don’t dig.’

He held up one of the folders. ‘This about a product,’ he said, ‘that will be flooding the stores, we hope, at Yuletide.’

‘But this is July.’

‘We must plan ahead, must we not.’

I admit I shuddered. Not at the notion of his cashing in on Xmas, particularly, because everyone does that, but at the whole idea of the festive season, which comes up like an annual nightmare. The thing that’s always struck me about Merry Xmas is that it’s the one day of the year when you mustn’t drop in on your friends, because everyone’s locked tight inside his private fortress. You can smell it already when the leaves are getting golden, then those trashy cards begin arriving which everyone collects like trophies, to show how many pals they’ve got, and the horror of it mounts right up to that moment, round about 3 p.m. on the sacred afternoon, when the queen addresses the obedient nation. This is the day of peace on earth and goodwill among men, when no one in the kingdom thinks of anyone outside it, let alone the cats next door, and everyone is dreaming cosily of himself,
and reaching for his Alka-Seltzer. For two or three days, it’s true, the English race all use the streets, where they never dare to loiter for the rest of the long year, because then streets are things that we must hurry through, not
stand
in, students sing ghastly carols in railway stations and shake collecting boxes at the peasants to prove the whole thing’s charitable and authorised, not bohemian, and when it’s all over, people behave as if a disaster had just overtaken the entire nation – I mean, they’re dazed, and blink as if they’d been entombed for days, and are awaking up to life again.

‘You look thoughtful,’ the Partners number said.

‘I am! I mean, the idea of planning for all that in
mid-July
. I’m really sorry for you.’

‘Thank you,’ he told me.

Then I took a swift grip of myself, and, sitting down firmly on a sprung white leather sofa, so that he couldn’t throw me out before I’d ended, I told him of my plan for the exhibition, and asked what he could do about it to help. He didn’t laugh, which was certainly something, and said, ‘I’ve not seen any of your photographs, I believe.’

‘Dido’s got some …’

‘Oh – those. Yes. But have you anything more exhibitable?’

I whipped out a folder from my inside breast, which I’d been carrying these days for emergencies like this, and handed it over to him. He looked at them carefully against the light, and said, ‘They’re not commercial.’

‘Of course not!’ I cried. ‘That’s the whole point about them.’

‘They’d need presentation,’ he continued. ‘But they’re very good.’

He put them down, looked at me with his ‘amused’ smile (I could have smacked him), and said, ‘I’m a very busy man. Why should I do anything for you?’

I got up. ‘The only possible reason,’ I said, looking him as coolly in the eye as I was able, ‘would be because you want to.’

‘It’s a very good one,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

I shook his hand. ‘You’re a nice cat,’ I said.

‘There, I’m afraid,’ he told me, ‘you’re really very much mistaken. Shall we have a drink?’

He went slowly to a mirrored chest. ‘Tonic for me,’ I said, ‘and thank you.’

I turned down V. Partners’ offer of a meal, because I’ve always found that, whenever someone’s done you an unexpected favour (I mean, as unexpected to them as it has been to yourself), it’s best to keep right out of their way for just a moment, so that their promise can bite into their consciences a bit, otherwise they’re apt just to talk the thing away to death immediately. So I said goodbye to him for now, and headed it out of the deserted Mayfair area, because I wanted to look in at a jazz club, for purposes best known.

You’ll have dug, of course, that the Dubious, which I referred to earlier, is not a jazz club. It’s a drinking club where some of the jazz community foregather, but a jazz club is a much bigger place where fans go to dance and listen, and not drink at all, except for softs and coffees. The one I was calling at is the Dickie Hodfodder Club,
which consists of an enormous basement, a flight of concrete steps leading down thereto, a commissionaire, who does nothing, a ticket vendor who sells tickets, the aforesaid soft and coffee bars, several hundred fans of either sex and, of course, the Dickie Hodfodder ork, led by Richard H. in person, playing away merrily a sort of not very tidal mainstream and, alternating with them, on certain evenings, a group called Cuthberto Watkyns and Haitian Obeah, of which the less said (and heard) the kinder. My object in going was therefore not artistic, but because I thought I might catch a character called Ron Todd.

This Ron Todd is a Marxist, and closely connected with the ballad-and-blues movement, which seeks to prove that all folk music is an art of protest, which, fair enough, and also – or, at any rate, Ron Todd seeks to – that this art is somehow latched on to the achievements of the USSR, i.e. Mississippi jail songs are in praise of sputniks. Ron has some powerful contacts on the building sites, and what I wanted to ask him was if we could somehow arrange to hoist the ex-Deb and the Hoplite and my own good self and camera, up on top of one of those mammoth cranes along the south bank, and take some snapshots of the scene. Why I thought I might find him in the Hodfodder place was that I knew he admired the male vocalist in the Cuthberto Watkyns ensemble, who had some songs in dialect French about the resistance movement to Napoleon, I think it was, of the last King of the Zombies, which Ron wanted to have him perform at a ballad-and-blues festival he was
Mc-ing in the ice-rink up there on Denmark Hill.

But, as a matter of fact, when I got down into the sub-soil, the first person who accosted me wasn’t Ron, but the last one I expected, which was Big Jill. She was wearing her suedette jeans and a woollen cap with a long hanging bobble, and was sitting at a table with some empty Pepsis, looking miserable. But when she called me over, her voice sounded loud and clear above the Hodfodder combo.

‘Alone, Jill?’ I said. ‘All the young starlets too busy to keep you company a while?’

‘Sit down, stud,’ she said, ‘and feast your eyes upon a vision.’

‘Where?’ I asked, thinking she could hardly mean the personnel of the R. Hodfodder band, though she was staring intently in their direction. ‘In just a moment now,’ she said.

So I stared too, over the hundred heads of the kids whipping it up in the small central space for dancing, or standing around, all in their sharpest garments, the boys tapping a knowledgeable toe or rocking slightly, the chicks looking a bit restless, eyes wandering, because, say what you like, the birds don’t go much to the clubs to
listen
. When after a bit of nonsense on the drums, R. Hodfodder gripped the mike, and told us his vocalist, Athene Duncannon, would now be with us.

Big Jill rose four inches off her seat and gripped a Pepsi bottle.

Miss A. Duncannon was quite okay, and the kids certainly enjoyed her, but I must say I do think it’s
a mistake for young white English girls to try to give an exact imitation of Lady Day, since the best possible imitation that’s conceivable would come about two million miles from what Billie H., at her best, can do to you, which is turn you completely over, so that you can’t bear to hear any other singers, at any rate for an hour or so after. However, from Big Jill’s point of view, I could quite see the situation, because this Athene D. was a highly flexible creation, who wore her dress tighter than her skin beneath it, and glared at the assembly in that imitation-woman manner that’s getting to be fashionable among white US female vocalists, if you can judge from the poses on the LP sleeves.

‘Oh!’ cried Big Jill.

‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ said a voice.

This was Ron Todd, who’d come up and stood by the table, looking scruffy and disapproving, in the correct ballad-and-blues manner, and who also was one of those people who believe that, if they haven’t seen you for a while, then you must certainly have been out of town, or died, because they see
everyone
.

‘Yes, long time no see,’ I said to him. ‘Come over here, I want to talk to you.’

But when I got him in a fairly vacant corner, and started my spiel about the mammoth crane, I could see he wasn’t listening, but glaring across above the innocent and cheery faces of the Hodfodder fans at a number who was coming down the steps, wearing some very fancy schmutter: mauve, button-two tuxedo, laced shirt, varnished pumps with bows, and, on his arm, a nameless dame.

‘That’s Seth Samaritan!’ cried Ron.

This was more or less how K. Marx himself might speak of the head of the Shell Oil company (if there is one), because S. Samaritan is the number-one villain of Ron’s picture-book – and not only of Ron’s – the reason being, that he was the first to see, a few years back, that jazz music, which used to be for kids and kicks, had money in it, and opened clubs and signed up bands, and brought in talent from afar, and turned it all into minks and Jags and a modest little home at Teddington. I tried to get Ron back on top of that South Bank crane again, but it was heavy labour.

‘I’d like to put him in!’ cried Ron, waggling his briefcase because, like a lot of musical cats this summer, he had a thing of carrying one without a handle, but a zip complete with lock and key.

‘Take it easy, Ronald. Put it all in a song.’

He stared at me. ‘You’ve got an idea, there, you know,’ he said. ‘What rhymes with pieces of silver?’

I racked my brains, but had to admit I couldn’t help him.

‘This place is bad enough,’ Ron said, waving his briefcase round the musical establishment, ‘but just imagine it if Seth Samaritan moves in.’

‘You’re right,’ I said.

Ron glared at me behind his Gilbert Harding lenses. ‘You say so,’ he cried, ‘but do you mean it?’

‘Well, yes, I do. I mean you’re
right
.’

‘I am?’

‘Well, yes, you are. I mean there’s
source
music, isn’t
there, and period music, that feeds on it, and just comes and goes.’

‘That’s it!’

‘In England, most of what you hear is period. Not much source.’

‘There you go!’

‘And that applies as much to you ballad-and-blues puritans as it does to the jazz cats.’

This didn’t go down quite so well. ‘Our art’s authentic,’ Ron Todd said.

‘It was,’ I told him. ‘But you don’t think up enough songs of your own. Songs about the scene, I mean, about us and now. Most of your stuff is ancient English, or modern American, or weirdie minority songs from pokey corners. But what about
our
little fable? You’re not really trying – any more than Dickie Hodfodder is.’

‘What a comparison!’ cried Ron, in high disgust.

But I saw I was breaking one of my golden rules, which is not to argue with Marxist kiddies, because they
know
. And not only do they know, they’re not
responsible
– which is the exact opposite of what they think they are. I mean, this is their thing, if I dig it correctly. You’re
in
history, yes, because you’re budding here and now, but you’re
outside
it, also, because you’re living in the Marxist future. And so, when you look around, and see a hundred horrors, and not only musical, you’re not responsible for them, because you’re beyond them already, in the kingdom of K. Marx. But for me, I must say, all the horrors I see around me, especially the English ones, I feel responsible
for, the lot, just as much as for the few nice things I dig.

But, as I thought this, my eyes had strayed away from Ron, a foot or two to that commissionaire I spoke of, who, not being interested, I suppose, in the performance, was reading an evening paper, I don’t blame him, and I caught a headline. I just said, ‘Excuse me,’ and took the paper from him, and looked at a photograph of Suze and Henley, and ran up the steps into the street. Quite honestly, I don’t know quite what happened then, because my next quite clear recollection was batting along a highway on my Vespa, which went on for miles and miles, I don’t know where, until the petrol ran out, it stopped, and I was nowhere.

So I got off the vehicle, which I cared about no longer, and sat down on the verge, and watched the car lights flash by occasionally. I thought of an accident – yes, I did – but not for long, because I wasn’t going to be rubbed out by a gin-soaked motorist returning to his bed out in the suburbs, and I thought of leaving the country, or dragging some chick or other to the registry and getting wed myself – I thought, in fact, of anything but Suze, because that would be just too horribly painful at the moment, though it was really an agony not to do so – I mean not think of her – in fact practically impossible: because even when I
didn’t
think of her, I felt the ache of that I wasn’t – really a torture. And at that point, the verge I was sitting on turned out not to be a verge, but a pile of metals for the roadway, and the bloody thing collapsed and I slid down in a cascade on to the Vespa, overturning it.