And that’s what I did, and am still doing. I like making jams, jellies and chutneys when the fruit is in season, though there are some you can rustle up at any time in the year – dried apricot, for instance, and the exotic Creole jam, composed of bananas, the juice and zest of two or three limes, a spoonful of cinnamon and a generous measure of rum. The friends and acquaintances who enjoy this tend to be exotic themselves – given to owning parrots or mynah birds, or communing with the Beyond via a number of middle-aged women with suburban addresses that boast names – ‘Rest-a-While’, ‘Magnolia Lodge’ – instead of numbers.
Once a year, and that once is enough, a friend brings me crab apples and medlars from her garden. The patience called upon to convert these inedible fruits into appetizing jellies is of the superhuman kind, what with straining the liquid through muslin and ensuring that not one precious drop – and every drop is precious –is wasted.
I seldom eat my own jam, preferring to give it away to the appreciative and to those I wish to thank for acts of kindness. Making it properly affords me enough satisfaction. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’ – it’s strange to look back on that summer afternoon when I found a means to keep grief at bay for an hour or so.
Clearance
Edie stood in state in the front room for months after David’s death. Circe, waking from a long sleep, would bark at her, hoping perhaps for some response from the curious individual with no arms, legs or head. Edie’s sizeable bosom did not heave at the sound. She was fixed to her spot, in the bay of the window.
Edie was David’s tailor’s dummy. Dresses worn by many of the greatest opera singers of the second half of the twentieth century had been put together piece by piece on Edie’s immobile frame. The corset that had given Montserrat Caballé the unexpected bonus of a waist had been moulded and built on Edie.
How did she come to be called Edie? In 1961, three years before meeting David, I was in the company of the then Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon playing the smallest of small parts, carrying spears and understudying robustly healthy actors. In Richard III, in which I appeared as Lovel, Eric Porter played Buckingham with guileful authority. Each night in the wings, shortly before his first entrance, he would hitch up his robe and say something outrageous to make us all laugh. A favourite, much-repeated cri de coeur that Eric loved to deliver was the one expressed by a distraught brothel keeper alerting her maid-of-all-work to the prospect of custom: ‘Not a pisspot emptied, not an armpit washed, and the street full of Spanish sailors. Edie!’ Eric would lower his robe and march on to the stage with a retinue of nobles behind him struggling desperately to keep their faces straight.
So the overwoked ‘Edie’, emptying the pots and supervising the scrubbing of armpits, gave her oft-shrieked name to the dummy. The inanimate Edie was photographed beside me in the autumn of 1986 for a magazine article to coincide with the publication of my novel Gabriel’s Lament. The young photographer, Chris, was amused by her presence in an otherwise conventionally furnished room. The photograph was shown in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery after Chris’s death on the Marchioness, the pleasure boat that sank in the Thames on 20 August 1989.
Edie was the last of David’s possessions to go. Friends were grateful to receive his sewing machine, the corsets and bodices and an array of leftover fabrics. These were a pleasure to dispense. Only his clothes remained in the wardrobe. For a while I was unable even to touch them.
Then, one morning, I returned from the park with the dog, and in an automatic daze I filled bags with shirts, jackets, sweaters, trousers, shoes. I carried them to the nearest charity shop, and on reaching home I tore up all the remaining pictures of him. I was staggered at the ease with which I performed what seemed like an act of ruthlessness. I wanted some part of our past to be obliterated.
Edie is now resident in Bloomsbury, where her chest and waist are still giving service. What I have of David, apart from his undying presence, is an exquisite gold neck chain and the Swiss watch he bought for me when he was flush. Daily reminders; lasting gifts.
The Woman in Whites and the Man with a Mission
I first noticed the would-be tennis player more than twenty years ago, when the last bloom of youth was beginning to fade from both our faces. She was always immaculately turned out in pristine, pleated, white shorts and a crisply ironed white blouse. Her white socks and running shoes were equally clean, with no traces of turf on them. She carried a racquet, a string bag containing tennis balls, and an elegant leather handbag. She sometimes wore a pink bow in her neat blonde hair.