Anatomy of Restlessness Read Free Page B

with a story, Francis Wyndham encouraged, criticised, edited and managed to convince me that I should, after all, try my hand at another book. His greatest gift was permission to continue.
    One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache.
    â€˜I’ve always wanted to go there,’ I said. ‘So have I,’ she added. ‘Go there for me.’ I went. I cabled the Sunday Times : ‘Have Gone to Patagonia’. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia and Hemingway’s In Our Time . Six months later I came back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published. While stringing its sentences together, I thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. I am older and a bit stiffer, and I am thinking of settling down. Eileen Gray’s map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.
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    1983

A PLACE TO HANG YOUR HAT
    Sometime in 1944, my mother and I went by train to see my father aboard his ship, the Cynthia , a US minesweeper which had been lent to the British and had docked in Cardiff Harbour for a refit. He was the captain. I was four years old.
    Once aboard, I stood in the crow’s nest, yelled down the intercom, inspected the engines, ate plum pie in the ward-room; but the place I liked most was my father’s cabin – a calm, functional space painted a calm pale grey; the bunk was covered in black oilcloth and, on a shelf, there was a photograph of me.
    Afterwards, when he went back to sea, I liked to picture my father in the calm grey cabin, gazing at the waves from under the black-patent peak of his cap. And ever since, the rooms which have really appealed to my imagination have been ships’ cabins, log cabins, monks’ cells, or – although I have never been to Japan – the tea-house.
    Not long ago, after years of being foot-loose, I decided it was time, not to sink roots, but at least to establish a house. I weighed the pros and cons of a whitewashed box on a Greek island, a crofter’s cottage, a Left Bank garçonnière , and other conventional alternatives. In the end, I concluded, the base might just as well be London. Home, after all, is where your friends are.
    I consulted an American – a veteran journalist, who, for fifty years, has treated the world as her back yard.
    â€˜Do you really like London?’ I asked.
    â€˜I don’t,’ she said, in a gruff and cigaretty voice, ‘but London’s as good as any place to hang your hat.’
    That settled it. I went flat-hunting—on my bicycle. I had but five requirements: my room (I was looking for a single room) must be sunny, quiet, anonymous, cheap and, most essentially, within walking distance of the London Library – which, in London, is the centre of my life.
    At house agents, I talked to fresh-faced young men who might have had carnations in their buttonholes. They smiled politely when they heard my requirements, and they smiled contemptuously when they heard how much I had to spend. ‘The bedsitter’, they said, ‘has vanished from this area of London.’
    Beginning my search to the west, I visited a succession of studio conversions, each more lowering than the last, all outrageously priced. I had visions of being ground down by mortgage payments, or by yakking children on the next floor landing. Finally, I explained to a friend of solid Socialist convictions my reasons (which seemed to her perverse) for wanting an attic in Belgravia.
    I wanted, I said, to live in one of those canyons of white stucco which belong to the Duke of Westminster and have a faint flavour of the geriatric ward; where English is now a lost language; where, in the