Three weeks in England must have turned the Good Wife’s head. Now safely restored to the marital bed, the ‘best place on earth’, she told me about a dream she’d had in the night. She was being dressed for her new role as queen of England by Ralph Fiennes, but was worried that she didn’t have any white underwear to go with her regal robes. She has weird and wonderful dreams, and our local doctor, who’s on the same wavelength, has asked her to write them out for him and send them by e-mail.
Her dreams were one reason why I was so enchanted back in 1987, the year I fell in love. I even attempted a short story based on her dream of ‘Henry of the St. Islet’, but failed to capture the same ludicrous magic. I remember once she woke us both up one night in our Sheffield terraced house by trying to get me to sign a cheque imprinted on her back. No doubt an itch that she needed to scratch. We must have giggled helplessly for a quarter of an hour or more. We giggled again the other day to discover that Animals Asia now address her by the remarkably absurd new name of Mrs. Sampson-Horyseck. How did that happen? (I went, but couldn’t figure.)
The dream of the royal preparations was probably prompted by re-watching The End of The Affair, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel with Julianne Moore and a young and horribly handsome Ralph Fiennes. That, perhaps, and our daughter’s recent work for a stylist, dressing the stars for certain red-carpet events. Isn’t it wonderful how the subconscious takes these snippets of reality and transforms them into the kind of mad, beguiling scenarios you could never make up in the cold light of day – unless of course you were Lewis Carroll or David Lynch?
I rarely remember my dreams, but dwell on more prosaic daydreams, some of which probably derive from scenes within half-remembered films that have long lodged in my cinematic subconscious. I suspect that elements of Shanghai Express and Night Train to Munich crept into my desire to take the sleeper from our local station to Paris. At the end of January, I was finally able to separate the reality from the romance.
The first practical issue was that of staying awake until driving down to the bourg to catch the 12.35 from Rodez. I set a precautionary alarm and idled away a few hours after dinner with some concert footage of Ella Fitzgerald and a fairly daft Anthony Mann western on a home-made DVD: A Man From The West, with the strong, silent, dependable Gary Cooper, the glamorous part-time jazz-pop singer Julie London, and the ever-mean Lee J. Cobb, reprising in another landscape his bullying role as Johnny Friendly in On The Waterfront. With time still on my hands and my bags packed beside me, I sat at our table and read the Asterix adventure my friend the Nazarene gave me.
At five past midnight, I could bear it no longer. I said my farewells to the cats, checked that the cooker was off and made my way down to the station. Earlier in the week I’d asked the secretary at the mairie if I could park at the Salle Mathieu just in case. I was equally pleased to hear her use my first name (a rare phenomenon in these parts) as I was to learn that I could. Needless to say, there were parking spaces galore at the station. So that meant another 20 minutes to kill in the reassuringly illuminated waiting room. A sensible fellow traveller joined me about five minutes before the due departure.
The train pulled in at the appointed hour. I got onto Voiture 22, the middle of three carriages, and waited for the conductor to check my ticket and show me to my couchette. He slid back the door to reveal a room barely bigger than a pantry, with five fellow travellers stacked one on top of the other in two parallel rows of three bunks. Fortunately, mine was a bottom bunk. The bulky young man in the corresponding bottom bunk across the paltry divide was still awake. He acknowledged my sotto voce bonjour with a sleepy blink.
I was soon disavowed of my crazy notion that I could unpack, slip into my pyjamas and park my slippers under the bed, primed for the inevitable trip to the loo in the wee small hours. Trying to get out of my coat while hunched up on my bunk conjured an image of Harry Houdini wriggling out of his chains in a subterranean coffin. Nothing for it but to park my bags at the foot of the bed, remove my shoes and lie down fully clothed. Did I say bed? It was more like a shelf in some Guatemalan prison cell. With neither curtain nor bedside light, I struggled to find the pillow and the sleeping bag provided, both encased in plastic. I made so much noise trying to extricate the pillow that I gave up on the idea of a sleeping bag and simply pulled my coat over me. With my feet propped on my bag at the bottom of my shelf, I lay back and let the rhythm of the railway lull me to sleep.
Inevitably, I awoke around five and made the long trek sans slippers down the corridor to the loo. On the way back, Amélie – our friendly conductress – announced that we were pulling into Limoges Benedictins. What the…? So was true, then, that the train dallies in Brive for an eternity, hooking up with another night train from Cahors or Toulouse. Back in my Guatemalan cell, Amélie proceeded to murder sleep by announcing every stop northwards to Paris. I probably succumbed to exhaustion for an hour tops half-past Orléans – to wake up un-refreshed sometime just after eight at Paris Austerlitz. Plenty of time to catch the Metro to Paris Nord, check in at Eurostar and get a coffee and croissant at Paul, the ubiquitous but tolerable cafeteria.
The rest of the trip was plain-sailing. I even made the connection at Southampton Airport for Romsey, where I would hook up with my itinerant wife at my sister’s. We were there for the 70th birthday celebrations of my brother-in-law at the White Horse on Saturday night. And very nice it was, too, even if I felt a little like a distant planet on the edge of the local solar system, observing at several removes my siblings, nephews, great nephews and local family friends. We danced to a band calling themselves AKA, who had provided the music at my youngest nephew’s wedding a couple of years ago – my father’s swansong, God rest his soul. It’s somewhat bizarre to hear a semi-pro band tackle things like Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’.
However, incorrigible obsessive that I am, the high-spot of my visit was neither the party nor dinner in Soho to celebrate the Good Wife’s birthday a couple of evenings later, but my trip to Boo Hoo Records in Southampton with my equally obsessive friend John, who celebrated his 80th birthday a few days before my brother-in-law turned officially old. Boo Hoo is run by another octogenarian, a man called Barry with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music particularly from the era when John sang with a ‘60s ‘beat band’. Hit with an excessive water bill for what amounts to nothing but a sink and a seedy loo, he’s decided to hang up his stereo equipment. Which meant that there were great piles of records selling for a pound. Being a generous man who bases his prices on an out-of-date catalogue rather than Discogs, he was happy to ‘do a price’ for anything from the permanent collection that we took to his cluttered counter. The pair of us flicked feverishly through separate piles, pausing to show one another this or that record of interest, fuelled by a kind of collector’s adrenaline. After a couple of hours in Barry’s Aladdin’s Cave, we both came away with a pile of records bought for less than a £20 note.
Boo Hoo occupies the ground floor of a dowdy, nondescript little building in a rather tawdry part of Southampton near the football stadium no doubt earmarked for re-development. No one, I’m sure, will be mad enough to take it over. John and I said our goodbyes and good lucks to Barry and a few days later I was happy to get home to Camp Street, France, with my precious cargo in its bulky Sally Army bag. But I’m sad, as John must be, to think that I’ll probably never see its like again in what’s left of my lifetime. Boo-hoo…
No comments:
Post a Comment