to cheer it up, but it was so damp she preferred to go out. Her ambition, if it could be called that, was to live in Notting Hill. Don, of course, lived in Notting Hill. His flat was the top floor of a house overlooking a square. He lived in some style. Tessa and Dee-Dee owned virtually nothing – their clothes, some records – but possessions seemed to cling to Don like burrs on a tweed skirt. ‘Doing his own thing’ was working as a porter in Bonham’s, but he also had the knack of finding pieces of junk in Portobello that later turned out to be valuable. His flat was a cave of Indian paintings, hookahs from Morocco (bought last summer), Turkish rugs (the spring before), seventeen different types of tea and seventeen tea-pots, books everywhere and on the ceiling one of Tessa’s murals, ‘The awakening of Consciousness’. It was here she spent most her time.
It was Tuesday but it could have been any day of the week, and what time it was was unclear; Don’s four clocks bonged hours and half-hours intermittently. Outside, yellowing leaves fell in the square. It was misty. Tessa and Dee-Dee were lying on the floor listening to Astral Weeks. The music was dreamy and melodic, Van Morrison’s peculiarly nasal voice felt right for their mood. Don’s room was autumnal too, brown, yellow and crimson. They were sad. Geoffrey had finally died, Don was at the solicitor’s with his father, the will was being read.
‘The Hall will be sold. Who will buy it?’ asked Dee-Dee on the goatskin rug.
‘Somebody,’ said Tessa.
They were smoking dope and were very stoned. Curiously the smell of hashish reminded her of the musty smell at St John’s. Dee-Dee started crying again, she had been doing this on and off since they first heard and that was a week ago.
‘Another time another place …’ sang Van Morrison.
‘Death’s not a bum trip,’ said Tessa; ‘it’s just moving from one thing to another like …’ but she couldn’t think what it was like.
‘We could have gone to the funeral,’ said Dee-Dee.
‘Funerals are for family, anyway we only met him once.’
Then Donald burst in. Tessa and Dee-Dee were stretched out on the floor; the atmosphere in the room was definitely comfortable, but Don jumped over both of them and ran to the kitchen.
‘God, I need a drink.’
‘Don, cool it, what’s happened?’
He sat on the floor and poured himself a cup of whisky.
‘What is it, have you been busted?’
He looked at their serious faces and began to laugh. ‘Geoffrey’s left me St John’s.’
‘Far out!’
‘He has, all of it, the whole bloody place, birds’ nests and all!’
‘Oh, Don!’ said Tessa and Dee-Dee in unison.
He poured himself another cup of whisky.
‘What are you going to do?’ said Dee-Dee, all anxious.
‘Do? I’m going to live there.’
‘That’s wild,’ said Tessa.
‘Like Geoffrey … and there’s money, too, that furniture of his, it’s valuable, it’s not rubbish … and the paintings … Hetty and George got the best things, two Stanhope Forbes and a Morrisot, we thought they were sold years ago …’
‘Oh, Don, what are you going to do?’ said Dee-Dee again.
‘Anything, anything I like …’ and his face took on a familiar far-away look.
So, Don went to Suffolk and Tessa and Dee moved into his flat. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for Notting Hill was the centre of the underground universe. Here were crash-pads for drop-outs, the Electric cinema and a macrobiotic restaurant. Here were happenings, music everywhere and enough marijuana to ensure everybody was stoned. Life at the flat was unscheduled, unrestricted. They woke and slept as they pleased and there were always people, thumping bongos, strumming guitars, dancing, reading poetry and smoking dope. To Tessa and Dee-Dee this was freedom.
Don led a nomadic life between London and Suffolk. He bought a van to ferry Geoffrey’s furniture to sell in auctions. He was trying to raise money to restore St John’s. The builders had started re-roofing, re-plumbing. What he was going to do with the place was a source of endless discussion; a hospice for the dying? ‘but Geoffrey wouldn’t have liked that’; a museum of Eastern Art? That idea lasted two days; a free school ‘where children learned through their own experiences in the here and now and adults could change their perceptions of reality …’ But somehow anything to do with schools meant regulations and planning permission. The idea that was most consistent was to ‘fill the Hall with interesting people all sharing and co-operating …’, but St John’s was only slightly more than a ruin.
The following August, Tessa, Dee-Dee, Jeremy and a person called Edgar Bukowski from New Orleans all attended the Festival of Communes at the Roundhouse. This was ‘a big informal information-exchanging and food-sharing meal and meeting for Communes and people interested in Communes plus (perhaps) chanting and other signs of togetherness plus (perhaps) Quintessence and Third Ear Band’. In long dresses, loons, beads and bare feet, they danced, drummed and laughed, experiencing togetherness and being and felt it was as important as Woodstock. Don was there too, conspicuous with schoolboy hair and brown polished shoes, talking avidly to long-haired anarchists, but his communal ideas were hardly being clarified.
The sixties were over. Hendrix was dead, Janis Joplin was dead, the Beatles had split up, the Isle of Wight was a muddy memory. Uncertainty and doubt were creeping into the earthly paradise. Tessa and Dee-Dee in Don’s flat were restless. Previously their constant moving had satisfied a need for change, a feeling that if they stopped long enough to accumulate possessions and familiarity with a place then they would be settling down, or, worse still, be straight. They feared acutely normality as displayed by their parents’ uneventful lives in deepest Middlesex. But in the year that the old money was abandoned and in came tinny decimalisation, they began to wonder, ‘What now?’
Dee-Dee, Jeremy, his flute and an alarmingly small amount of money hitch-hiked to India to find the truth. They went after an all-night party on a damp November morning. Tessa stayed behind. She felt there was nothing she could find in India she couldn’t find in Notting Hill; after all, India, the Taj Mahal and everything were just places. The real truth was inside. Her restlessness was spiritual; she became inert. The crashers at Don’s flat were inert too. They lay on the floor to music, usually stoned or, more usually, tripping. Edgar Bukowski was now a permanent resident. He was a chunky six-foot with long lank hair in a ponytail. He claimed to have met Bob Dylan in a jazz bar in New Orleans. He said, ‘Hey, Bob, I love you,’ and Bob said, ‘Man, that’s cool.’ It may not have been true but it gave Edgar Bukowski kudos. He and Tessa were lovers. There were other people who were Tessa’s lovers, both men and women, but during that winter Edgar had precedence. Together they blacked out all daylight in the flat, consulted the tarot, read Alistair Crowley, listened to the Doors and Captain Beefheart, and embarked on an inward journey to darkest parts. Here, the Queen of Swords was a fiery red and sliced the air with her weapon, the unforgiving chariot crushed them underfoot and the dogs of hell bayed to the moon as crayfish crawled out of a primeval slime. The walls of Don’s flat shook, grey-faced half-dead once-people moaned, Edgar’s
