art and literature.’
It sounded absolutely horrendous. Miriam often misjudged me: I had neither the money nor the inclination to become a part of the Isokon set. During those years I may have been debauched, but I have never, ever been a bohemian.
The place was quite bare and undecorated. Not only was there little furniture, there were no shelves, cupboards or mantelpieces for the many flowers, bibelots and thick embossed invitations that seemed to follow Miriam wherever she went. (It was often the case during our time together that we would fetch up in some out-of-the-way village or town, only for gifts and letters bearing invitations miraculously to appear within hours of our arrival.) In the Isokon, this temple to simplicity and stylishness, in which there was no place for anything, everything had been piled on a small round inlaid table in the hallway, which accommodated newly published books, manuscripts, gloves, scarves, jewellery and stacks of the aforementioned invitations. Above the table there was a sort of mobile hanging from the ceiling, which looked to me like a few large black metal fish bones stuck onto a piece of wire.
‘That’s … interesting, Miriam,’ I said.
‘Do you think? I’m trying to write a piece about it for the magazine,’ she said.
‘Woman?’ I asked.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I don’t write for them any more.’
‘But I thought you’d just got a job as columnist?’
‘No, no, Sefton. That was ages ago.’
‘That was about two weeks ago.’
‘Anyway. It was dreadfully dreary. They expected me to write about such terrible frivolities.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Such as?’
‘Accordion pleats or bishop’s sleeves or whatever other silly thing is in fashion.’
‘But I thought you were interested in fashion.’
‘Of course I am, Sefton, but I’m not interested in writing about it. People who write about fashion seem to me about as dull as people who write about medieval patristics.’ Thus spoke her father’s daughter. ‘People could go around in bustles and jodhpurs for all I care, Sefton – and I really don’t care.’
For someone who really didn’t care we seemed to spend much of our time packing and unpacking her clothes trunks.
‘Anyway, you know me, Sefton.’
‘I do?’
‘I have a taste for much stronger stuff, Sefton.’ Which was certainly true. ‘No. I’m now a contributing editor for Axis.’
‘Axis?’ I said. ‘Something to do with mechanics? Geometry?’
‘It’s an art magazine, silly. You must have heard of it.’
‘I can’t say I have, Miriam, no.’
‘Axis? Really?’
‘No.’
‘A Quarterly Review of Contemporary “Abstract” Painting and Sculpture?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that Axis.’
From the teetering pile on the table she plucked the latest issue of the magazine, which I flicked through while she went to finish her packing.
‘That’ll be an education for you,’ she said, as she disappeared into her bedroom.
It certainly was. Most of the articles were entirely – one might almost say immaculately – unreadable, as if written from a strange place where the English language had been entirely reinvented solely to bamboozle and confuse. One contributor, for example, described some blobby sort of a painting as ‘rampageous and eczematous’; another described an artist whose work consisted entirely of everyday household objects hung on washing lines as having ‘traversed the farthest realms of the aesthetic to reinvent the very idea of objecthood’; Miriam’s article was perhaps marginally less preposterous than the rest, though equally vexatious. She described some artist’s series of abstract sketches as a work of ‘profound autofiction’: to me the work looked like a series of a child’s drawings of black and white squares and triangles balancing on colourful balls.
Miriam’s restless pursuit of knowledge of all kinds was of course quite admirable, her hunger for new experiences rivalling only her father’s great lust for learning. Having endured a privileged, if rather peculiar upbringing and education at some of the country’s best schools, and courtesy of one of the country’s best minds, Miriam often expressed to me her wish that she had gone to Cambridge or to Oxford to study PPE (which, to my shame, I usually referred to as GGG, or ‘Ghastly Girls’ Greats’, an easy alternative to Classics). ‘All these women who go to Lady Margaret Hall do make one feel terribly inadequate, Sefton.’ During our work together on The County Guides, Miriam slowly but surely reinvented herself, becoming more and more an autodidact in the manner of her father: she went to fewer tennis parties with girls called Diana and Camilla, took up the saxophone and the uilleann pipes, added Arabic and Mandarin Chinese to her many languages, and ranged widely in her reading, from Freud in German to Céline in French. She was naturally formidable: over time she became utterly extraordinary. It was sometimes difficult to see how anyone could possibly keep up with her.
When I occasionally asked why she had taken up with this unsuitable man or other, she would simply say, ‘Because everyone else is so boring, Sefton.’ Boredom was her bête noire. It could get her into terrible trouble. Her most recent boyfriend was a man so daring and adventurous that he had joined Britannia Youth, the neo-fascist group that specialised in sending impressionable young British schoolboys to Nazi rallies in Germany.
‘Roderick was just such fun!’ she said.
Roderick had lasted about two weeks.
‘Right,’ she said, barrelling out of her bedroom carrying a large handbag.
‘Crocodile?’ I nodded towards the bag.
‘Alligator, actually, Sefton. Can’t you tell? Are you ready?’
‘I am. Is that all you’re taking?’ I was confused. Miriam did not travel light. Part of the challenge of travelling with Miriam and Morley was travelling with Miriam’s clothes: for even the shortest journey she would pack Chinese robes, leopard-skin hats and kid leather gloves.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s it?’
‘The rest is already in the Lagonda, Sefton. László gave me a hand last night. Do you know László?’
‘I don’t think I do, no.’
‘You
