Past Kemble, after the Swindon change, there were hills, horses on hillside fields in the sun. To the left of the track the land dropped away, green treetops down in the valley reminded me of the foothills of middle Georgia. Outside Stroud, as we were crossing a stream moving quickly through young willows, I saw ducks rising together and schoolchildren on a narrow dirt path leading under a small brick bridge, one boy waving a Union Jack at the train. Two seats ahead of me, a woman was telling her little boy and girl to stop singing ‘Yellow Submarine.’
After Gloucester, where the land is flat again, the train heads north to come to Cheltenham. The official guidebook still called it Cheltenham Spa, though the ‘healing medicinal waters’ that attracted ‘the elite of many generations’ went bad some years ago. Exactly how many years ago the guidebook didn’t say. It didn’t matter. I didn’t come here to take a bath.
Taxis were parked outside the redbrick train station, but because I always do things the hard way, I let them leave with other passengers and started walking, with a black nylon flight bag – too small to hold clothes, a tape recorder, and the book about Hemingway – slung on a strap from my shoulder, the book like a circuit rider’s Bible in my hand. There are back streets in Cheltenham that look like back streets in Queens, New York, or Birmingham, Alabama, Depression-era apartment buildings and houses with lawns where no grass grows. The book and the bag were both getting heavy by the time I reached the center of town. Cheltenham was built mostly during the Regency, and the stately columns of the Municipal Center regard, across the broad Promenade and its tree-darkened side-walks, the Imperial Gardens, bright with red, mauve, and yellow tulips planted in neat curves and rectangles, sparrows dancing about, pigeons whirling and coursing overhead.
I walked on to a side street, found a phone kiosk, and from its picture in the yellow pages chose the Majestic Hotel on Park Place. It looked like the hotel where W. C. Fields would stay when he was in town. It was also between where I was and Hatherley Road, where Brian Jones grew up.
I had walked far enough to welcome, if I had any sense, a ride in a taxi, but I was not ready for that. I wanted to walk past the fine shops of the Promenade and the neat houses under the manicured trees. Cheltenham was designed to be a nice place, and it is a nice place, up to the point where they decide you are not so nice. Some of Cheltenham’s nicest people had not spoken to Brian Jones’ mother and father in years, while others stopped speaking to them only when Brian was buried in consecrated ground, his final outrage. You can listen close and hear the clippers clipping the hedges of Cheltenham.
The Majestic Hotel loomed like a faded ghost among apartment buildings going to seed. The desk clerk was in a little glass case like a ticket booth. The bartender leaned on his elbows in the empty cocktail bar, wrinkling the sleeves of his starched white jacket. The elevator smelled as if it had been closed since the 1920s. Slowly it took me to the third floor, to my single with a sink. The room was loaded, as are all single hotel rooms, with intimations of loneliness and death, of killing the night in loneliness. I lay down on the salmon-colored bedspread.
My feet rested for a few minutes, but my mind didn’t. No book is any help against loneliness, and no drug can touch it. After she left him, Brian must have kept on thinking about Anita Pallenberg as, alone, I kept on thinking. Anita thought that Marlon, the son she had with Keith last year after Brian died, would be Brian reborn. He wasn’t, but she did not stop thinking about Brian. ‘I’ll see him again. We promised to meet again. It was life or death,’ Anita said. ‘One of us had to go.’ A tough decision. I swung my tired feet off the bed. Thinking was getting me nowhere.
The elevator was just as slow going down. The bartender was still leaning on the bar, not a customer in sight.
I walked back to the Imperial Gardens and sat on a green park bench to smoke some marijuana and observe the end of Wednesday afternoon. Maids were clearing the red, blue, and green tables under the orange-and-yellow-striped umbrellas that said Tuborg, where a few people were still eating snacks among the flowers. The inscription on the gardens’ sundial read: ‘I only count your sunny hours/Let others tell of storms and showers.’ Now just one boy and girl were lying on the grass, not moving, as if they intended to spend the night here.
Looking out over the tulips and trees and softly humming motors of twilit Cheltenham, I thought of Brian saying, on a visit home near the end of his life, ‘If only I’d never left here.’ I fieldstripped the cigaret end, tearing the short paper, rolling it into a tiny pill that would vanish, with the smoking material, into the wind. Then I crossed the Promenade, passing the third military monument I’d seen in this town. The two others were for Africa 1899–1902 and World War I. This one’s plaque read, ‘This memorial was originally surmounted by a gun taken at Sevastopol. During the war of 1939–1945 the gun was handed to the government to provide the metal for armaments.’ Though it was smaller, Cheltenham reminded me of Macon, Georgia, where I went to high school wearing an army uniform, carrying a rifle: the last place where I felt constrained to fieldstrip cigarets, not because of smoking marijuana, but to keep the area well-policed. Both are pretty towns with many trees.
It was 6:44, and I just had time for a sandwich. Down the street was a café that looked as deserted as the bar at the Majestic, just an East Indian girl in a white uniform behind the counter. She was putting things away, getting ready to close, but she asked if I wanted to eat.
I bought a watery orange drink and a cheese sandwich, because there aren’t many ways to ruin a cheese sandwich. A woman came in, took the money from the cash register, let the girl out the back door and locked it. As the girl left I realized that she had the only dark skin I had seen in this town.
Back at the hotel, I was so cool and relaxed that my tape recorder was still packed away when the desk clerk called to say that a taxi was waiting. I loaded the recorder with tape and then decided to leave it.
Before I could look over my notes the taxi pulled into the parking lane to let me out. The mustard-colored semi-detached houses with tiny squares of glass behind brick fences, perched uneasily on the rim of the middle class, looked so small and regular that I thought I must be at the wrong place. But I entered at the gate and went up to the front door, where a glowing plastic bell-ringer bore the name L. B. Jones. I rang the bell and waited, trying to smile. It was night now, and I was standing in a pool of yellow light under the porch lantern, cars racing past on the dark road, flashing in each other’s headlights.
The little man who opened the door had receding grey hair and a rather broad but sharp-nosed face, red under the pale, lined skin. As I began talking, I couldn’t stop thinking that he was the same size as Brian, that they must have identical skeletons. He had Brian’s, or Brian had his, way of walking almost on tiptoe, holding his hands back beside his hips. He had the same short arms and small, strong hands, and though Mr Jones’ eyes, behind glasses framed with gilt metal and grey plastic, did not have the quality Brian’s eyes had of being lit from within, he had Brian’s funny one-eyed way of looking at things. He stood before me, one foot forward, hands down by his pockets almost in fists, peering with one eye.
I said who I was, Mr Jones said he was glad to see me and led me into the living room, where I sat on a couch, my back to the front wall, and he sat in a stuffed chair printed with ugly flowers before the unlit electric fireplace. He told me that I was the fourth of my countrymen who had come to discuss writing about Brian. ‘People come with letters from publishers, then they go away and one hears nothing more. I don’t know what to make of it. I think they’re pulling my leg,’ he said, again turning one eye on me.
I started to answer him, getting as far as, ‘Er, ah,’ when Brian’s mother came in. I struggled to my feet and said hello. She looked gentler than Mr Jones. She called him Lewis and he called her Louie, short for Louisa. Her eyes were a normal, pretty blue. Her hair was as yellow as Brian’s, a shade that appeared to age well if given the chance.
We
