The Altar of the Dead

Four years ago I went to the Horniman Museum one August afternoon, and afterwards I sat in the museum’s garden, and wondered how much time I had left. I was forty-one, out of­ condition, out of sorts, unemployed and unattached. And would you have said, in the annoying way that people have: snap out of it, get some exercise, get a job, get hitched, what are you talking about, you’ve got all the time in the world?

I sat in two places in the garden. It is on a hill, and has views over London that are called commanding. In the first place, I simply felt miserable, pains all over my body, utterly unsuccessful. How long have you got was then an urgent question. But I walked away, and up the hill, and on another park bench surrendered myself and my body to the sun and south London below. Do you feel like this sometimes, that you have no idea whether large tracts of your life are pleasure or pain?

Then I thought about those who need no longer wonder this, my personal dead. Like in the Henry James story, “The Altar of the Dead”, only I wasn’t likely to erect any altars to them. I am sometimes considered a nice person, but I lack pity. I don’t believe we care for others really, only intermittently do we wish them well. We are the only species that systematically kills its own kind. I am not worse than you are in half-rejoicing over the dead.

They were all roughly of my own age; one thinks less about the older ones. They had died within a short time, like a shower of death’s scythe. There was the son of my parents’ friends, the diabetic, who had died alone in an empty house. The strange, vivid girl met at a snowbound party, gone three months later of a brain haemorrhage. The half-friend half-enemy from school pushed off a roof in Los Angeles. The AIDS deaths. The … I didn’t remember the rest.

Except one. He was called Martin, and was more significant. I was slightly worried that I did not feel his loss, because he had been my friend.

But is that true? I had known him more than twenty years. We had met at Oxford. He was a Northern Irish Catholic, brilliant, a sexual conqueror, could destroy me with a word, but honoured me with his friendship. But at twenty-five his life stopped, and the rest, until his blood pressure killed him at forty-three, was epilogue. He lived in a tiny stinking room on the dole in Oxford, attending Mass most days, drinking, smoking and having sex until he grew too infirm.

During those long years, I visited him, always at the end of my stay in Oxford. In the early evening, having eaten some overpriced meal, I would approach his Jericho street. I would hear his limping step coming behind the door (thugs had thrown him down some stairs), and he would greet me with great pleasure and without surprise. We would enter his terrible room, and I would sit briefly on his bed, which was always damp. Then off to the pub, where I would buy him drinks and lend him money, and we would recall the youth we had shared. And sooner than he wished I would catch the train or the bus to London.

I parted from him the last time on the corner of a street, when it was dark, and the wind was blowing. It was two years before I returned to Oxford, and by that time he was a year dead. I never found out whether it was heart attack or stroke that finally did for him. But he went out like a light. He died in his room.

I suppose it was the poetry of his situation that kept me coming back, just as with the elderly author immobile in a nursing home whom I have been visiting. Then there were the nine neighbours of mine on the estate who died during the course of 1999. In their case, I liked the symmetry of the numbers.

And the intimations of mortality in my own body as I sat in the garden, did they attract me less? As well ask why I become so cheerful when I pass the cemeteries along the railway lines. But that day, because the afternoon was getting on, I went back into the museum, to drink an orange juice and use the loo before going home. The brief sun was gone, and it was building towards a storm. I walked the streets of Dulwich, gaining a sad pleasure from the dark Victorian villas, the rocking-horse glimpsed through a window, the path through the woods and down into the leafy bower of Sydenham Hill Station.

There were two Japanese girls on the platform, and to get away from their chattering I went to sit on another bench, which was outside the canopy. But then it really began to rain, and some rough London youths had turned up, so I went back near the Japanese, and their voices competed with the crash of rain on the roof, and the minutes and seconds, picked out in yellow and red, of the automatic clock.

Then the train came, and I felt terribly stiff walking towards it, but when it moved my body tensed with triumph, and thunder came all along the line, through Brixton of the picturesque arches, like a foreign city, the statue of the black man on the platform forlorn in the blinding rain, and on to the greater ugliness that lies beyond. 

* * * 

In south-east London there lies a prison whose name is feared in all the earth. A little hopper bus takes you there. You leave from near Woolwich Arsenal, melancholy now, and pass through the quiet estates, peaceful this hot weekday noon. Around you are the black and white populations, the big black women on the bus, the watchful whites coming out of the houses, and here and there, strolling along, one of those decorous Indian gentlemen whom Anita Brookner loves to celebrate in her novels. There are also parks, and streams, and the empty children’s playground, and the rough school. Then you cross a huge double carriageway and the bus comes to rest in a lay-by. You are surprised to find yourself the only passenger.

You walk quickly into the prison drive, the terrorist court is to your left, it is green, but the dirty white walls, streaked with black, are as they should be, ahead. Lawyers lounge about. You approach the portcullis from which you only recently emerged, and notice with surprise that the staff and visitors’ entrances are right next to it. A huge cocky screw is going either in or out. “You back, Hills?” he says indifferently. “I’ve just come to have lunch,” you murmur, and he says no more.

You go to the visitors’ centre. Now the lawyers are on the phones by the entrance and the unread leaflets. A patient queue of visitors is forming. You order food at the servery, and are just sinking down at your table when a black man comes with a questionnaire about whether you are aware of bullying in the prison. You get rid of him, but then the big blonde woman functionary who helped you fill in a form to claim resettlement benefit, but who has been ignoring you up till now, leaves her table of several others and comes over to find out why you are here. She too, however, seems satisfied that you have just come to have lunch.

Within half an hour, before the visitors go in, you are gone. You stop briefly at the Princess Alice across the road, all Union Jacks, darts games and scraggy youths stripped to the waist, and enjoy a glass of wine in the garden. Then you emerge onto the fast, hot road. You begin to walk, and beyond the end of the prison wall and the protecting woods, you catch a glimpse, across a vast patch of waste ground, of the rooftop of the very block where you were. Strange longing pierces your heart.

But you buy a bottle of water from middle-aged London men gathered around a wayside stall, you pass the carpet warehouse and the bus depot, and go down into the dark, leafy bowels of Plumstead Station. Within a few minutes the train comes, and you are moving from the last of the London postal districts into dreamy Kent. 

C.A.R. Hills, who now lives in Portugal, has written stories and articles for numerous publications, including Quadrant.