Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (32 page)

Ballard was fascinated by technique, craftsmanship. When Fay, herself a painter, became a student of art history, he would discuss the anonymous interior spaces of Francis Bacon compositions and enthuse over the synthetic colours of carpets in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. As a young girl, Fay perched on the corduroy sofa in the study, mesmerized by a Max Ernst poster,
The Robing of the Bride
, in which the feathered cloak of a naked birdwoman reprised the blood-orange tones of the ridged material on which she was sitting. She trawled through the shelves of reference books: Dali, Warhol, Bacon, Helmut Newton. And other less obvious interests. Reviewing a Stanley Spencer biography in 1991, Ballard proclaimed the Cookham painter as the last representative of an ‘innocent world before the coming of the mass media’. In a gesture of recognition, he said: ‘Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an island waiting for its Prospero.’

Playing along with telephone interrogators, Ballard claimed that, like William Burroughs, he would have preferred to be a painter. Meaning that he lived by the discipline of the studio, infinite variations on a menu of established themes and motifs; that his books were sometimes collaged and cut up like
The Atrocity Exhibition
, so that degraded scene-of-the-crime photographs were palpable beneath the charged surface. He could move a narrative through time and space by a cataloguing of objects, buildings, machines. Burroughs, in his final period in the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, did indeed become a painter and an elective surrealist, a recorder of dreams. He would tend the cats, pick up his prescription, and blast away at cans of paint. The house, through vanity portraits by visiting celebrities, remembers him.

‘Daddy produced two sculptures in the garden,’ Fay said. ‘I was very young, four or five. Sculptures made with milk bottles, chicken wire and concrete, slightly in the style of Henry Moore, but moving towards Paolozzi.’

The sculptures have vanished. The only record of their existence is a family photograph, taken in the garden, and reproduced in cropped form on the jacket of
Miracles of Life.
The three children, school-blazered, hair-ribboned, are delighted by something out of shot. Ballard, in dark sweater, white shirt, neat tie, smiles indulgently. Behind the fat cigar dangling from his hand, a minor sculptural intervention can be located: three diminishing Dali mouths stacked one above the other. The cement used in this work was also employed to make a monument for his son’s pet rabbit.

There were Ballard oil paintings too, much later, with strong primary colours. And painstaking Dali copies undertaken to find how it was done: the bread, the rocks, the clouds. These things have disappeared. But typographical collages, like ransom notes to an alien culture, have survived: the provocative advertisements Ballard made for Dr Martin Bax’s
Ambit
magazine. The ads display oblique fragments of text against found images. Claire Walsh, Ballard’s conduit to the information superhighway, is presented in these pieces as an early muse. One of the photographs was taken in his Ford Zephyr – he was loyal to Ford – after Claire came close to drowning, when she plunged into the sea in Margate, wearing a coat and wellington boots.

The younger Ballard had active contacts in the London subterranea of the 1960s. Michael Moorcock, collaborator in mischief, editor of
New Worlds
, joined him on a whirling carousel that led them towards Burroughs, Borges and Eduardo Paolozzi. But the two writers were never more than tourists on the skirts of the hive at Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room. ‘There were a couple of drunken days around Bacon,’ Moorcock told me, ‘but Jimmy and I tended to make our excuses and leave, because we were really family men and wanted to get home in time to fetch the kids.’

The Ballard of Brigid Marlin’s portrait is a St Jerome of Shepperton: bare table, pencil and manuscript. He undertook numerous European pilgrimages with Claire Walsh, as they investigated the genius of Velázquez, Goya, Dürer, Manet. ‘He loved Netherlandish art,’ Claire reported, ‘especially Van Eyck.’ In London, on Sunday afternoons, they haunted the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. When I followed in their footsteps, before moving around the corner to the National Portrait Gallery, to search out the Marlin portrait, it was not on display. ‘We’ve left him in the dark,’ the man at the desk said. ‘Much better for preservation. We can only show writers the general public request. Like Jane Austen.’

I looked for a lemon by Francisco de Zurbarán to represent the decaying object on the nursery mantelpiece. The closest I came was a still life of oranges and walnuts by Luis Meléndez. It wouldn’t do, Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said. The lemon, according to Lucia Impelluso, is a potent antidote to poison and a symbol of ‘amorous fidelity’.

Castle walls: Walter Scott-land buzzed by Heathrow’s oversubscribed flight path. Faith keeps the jumbos up there, faith we no longer have. A silhouette of heritage real estate stamped on a tin tray. This riverside avenue, under ancient trees, from which random plebeians are ruthlessly excluded: Royal Windsor, nemesis of walkers.

THIS IS A PROTECTED SITE UNDER SECTION
28
OF THE SERIOUS CRIME AND POLICE ACT
2005.
TRESPASS ON THIS SITE IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE
.

Much of the official Thames Path, after Shepperton, is nervous of uninvited guests. Savage dogs are name-checked, never seen.
NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH. NO ACCESS TO THE RIVER
. The upstream property portfolio is a mirror of our times, shifting from customized baronial (turrets, lawns, gazebos) to Carmel (California) glass-and-pine: the lifestyle deck, the private dock. A waterside balcony occupied, in one case, by a Blues Brother mannequin sprawled on a designer chair. The epitome of cool is when you can afford to hire somebody to chill for you. When you are too lazy to be lazy.

The more pretentious mansions are being re-conceptualized by IT operations, corporate hospitality, money religions. They take the ‘bank’ part of riverbank very seriously. You invest inthe historic Thames. You buy into the pleasure principle as a matter of business. But it’s challenging to be always on show. You don’t want grockles fouling the vista, lime-green anoraks gawping over the garden gate. The royals take the privacy fetish to extremes. Not content with park, castle, mausoleum, homefarm, they insist on fences inside fences. They shunt ramblers across the water for an infuriating trudge down a busy road, through scrub woods and open fields: to the commuter-hamlet of Datchet.

Wouldn’t I, if I had the equity, be out here too? A Mr Toad on the Thames: boat, swimming place, picture window? For sure. I have fantasized, most of my London life, about living in Narrow Street, Limehouse, on the bend of the river: with the comforting knowledge that it can never happen. My relish for this section of the path comes from voyeurism, a puritan kick at advancing through scenes from which I am barred, English arcadias that remain tantalizingly out of reach. I haven’t noticed a single swimmer anywhere from Gravesend to Maidenhead. Many rippling blue pools on manicured lawns, no plungers. No medicated Burt Lancaster, in scrotum-pinching briefs, Australian crawling, length after length, down chlorinated puddles that mock the flowing river.

Ghosts are out in the morning mist, shivering among the willows, appearing and reappearing on the road ahead. I saw my late father, at a point where sodden roots dropped into a woodland pool. The fine sand looked like a beach of gold coins. The dead come back three times, so they say. Their dreams and ours share common space in the water margins. I saw Ezra Pound, black hat, long coat, going down into the Underground in Kensington, a year after I’d visited his grave in Venice; crossing the lagoon to San Michele, the isle of the dead. Slender craft, elegant mourners: the Venice of Nicolas Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now.
We want what ghosts can’t have, heat. Warmth. Engagement. They lead us on, bone masks waiting for the right ventriloquist.

As I walked the Thames, I made lists of my own, photographs of diversion signs, private roads – and records of riverside camps, from the bivouac on the Isle of Grain to this hooped tent in the undergrowth near Bray. I was dodging around in beechwoods, trying to frame the crenellated white mansion on the other shore, where Hammer Films did their bit for the export trade by reinvigorating English Gothic with homoeopathic doses of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The pup tent was hidden by a covering of twigs, in a primitive hide, and guarded by a wolfish dog. I was sure that I had seen the tent before, several times, but the owner, if he was inside, did not show himself.

It was late in the year to be sleeping rough. My Thames excursion spanned the seasons. I kept breaking away, pushing the circuit further and further out: Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Middlesbrough, Gateshead. Taking whatever was offered by way of casual employment as itinerant culture preacher. And then returning to pick up where I left off: with that tent, the unknown camper, scouting the ground ahead of me. I had wasted so many months wondering how I could find a way out of London. Now, as a result of the Olympic Park enclosures, I had to accept the fact that there was no going back. Long hot days across the estuarine marshes dissolved into a deliriously rufous autumn in established woodlands between Maidenhead and Cookham. Detouring, yet again, I come on a picturesque cottage offering Kundalini yoga, serpent-power sex: ‘with immediate results’. Massage therapy, home-made chutney. Off-shore investment advice, honey from local hives. The Stanley Spencer Gallery is closed, but the graves are always open in the little riverside burial patch, that ‘holy suburb of heaven’, where the eccentric painter now lies. Cookham resurrections wind back time like an old clock, deceased villagers yawning and scratching towards a second Thames baptism. Turk’s boatyard, the setting for Spencer’s swan-upping ceremony, and for Christ’s appearance at the village regatta, has been converted into private flats. To come here, early, to row up towards Marlow, picnic, swim, was our favourite family outing. Stanley Spencer, that most grounded and domesticated of English painters, was more adventurous. He made it to China, on one of the first culture-binge exchanges, in 1954. He managed a couple of paintings of the Ming tombs on the outskirts of Beijing and a few sketches from the air. He lost a stone and a half in weight and never left England again.

Taking refreshment in an empty gastro pub, I found that Ballard’s interest in Spencer came into sharper focus: men of the river, choosing to keep London at a distance, while distilling a peculiarly English brew of perverse but undeceived sexuality. When Ballard, having lost his driving licence, took to walking around Shepperton, there was a moment of revelation: ‘Through the tranquil TV suburbs moved a light as serene as any Stanley Spencer had seen at Cookham.’ The dozy riparian settlements with which these men had such lengthy associations are now branded with their names. Cookham trades on Spencer, on the landscapes he turned out to pay his bills. Shepperton is yet to find a way to exploit Ballard.

The Ballard character in
The Kindness of Women
decides that it is time to take a Thames cruise and Cookham is the chosen destination. His partner, hoping to liberate the ‘prisoner of Shepperton’, is not enthusiastic. ‘Too many angels dancing in the trees. Be honest, do you really want to see Christ preaching again at the regatta?’ Ballard, his arm around his girlfriend’s waist, as she grips the wheel, elects to look back at what he is leaving behind: ‘the film studios and the riverside hotels, receding from me like the Bund at Shanghai’.

The impetus to complete this Thames walk came from an old wound: I was fulfilling, in actuality, an imagined journey from an earlier fiction. In
Radon Daughters
, my characters undertook a triangulation between three mounds: Oxford (with its hidden well), Cambridge (view of historic colleges), and the removed earthwork that once stood, ring of trees at the summit, beside the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. They walked, my creatures, keeping journals. And I felt it my duty to stay ahead of them, to base the fable on truth, a record of the hard miles. Time squeezed. I was still scrabbling about as a bookdealer, doing bits and pieces of journalism to stay afloat. Necessity overtook research: I marched, my unwilling shadows alongside me, as far as Marlow. Then I cheated, nudged the bogus journal forward to Dorchester-on-Thames. And tramped the last miles to Oxford in company with Renchi Bicknell and Chris Petit, who was using a new video camera to log projected expeditions around the ‘perimeter fence’ of English culture.

We acknowledged Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps, his
Landscape of the Vernal Equinox.
Petit’s interest in Nash extended about as far as those frozen seas of metal, abstracted scrapyards of wrecked fighter planes:
Totes Meer.
His attitude to landscape was German; the era of feature films was now over, but he was never comfortable without a pylon at the edge of the frame. He told me that he had endured his only English studio picture, an underlit Strindbergian version of P. D. James’s
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
, in Bray. What he remembered most about the experience was the caravan of chancers and parasites, hanging around the shoot, flogging dubious Rolex watches, designer drugs, sporting underwear. Like black-marketeers in the rubble of a captured city.

I tried, without success, to draw out Renchi’s memories of a hike from Hackney to Swansea, then the west of Ireland: all gone, visionary highlights emerging decades later as engravings. Walks overlapped walks: as films, paintings, poems, books read and books abandoned. The Thames Valley, even in clammy mist, when no excursionists were up and about, was overpopulated. Writing was selective quotation. In the novel, in
Radon Daughters
, the journal-keeper, as he stands on the bridge at Day’s Lock, rejoices in the knowledge that one of his companions has destroyed the manuscript of a lifelong work from which he could not, otherwise, have extracted himself. ‘He has absolved me of the complexities of the past. We hymn the emptiness of the landscape: corduroy mud, pylons, private orchards. Least known, most favoured.’