Vapor Trail:
Vacation Day
2 June 2015
Now: here’s how my library ought to work. I know this because it did, this morning. Leafing through the Times, I came upon a picture of the monastery of St Catherine in the Sinai, home of the oldest operating library in the world. I had never seen a photograph of this ancient establishment, which goes back to the middle of the Sixth Century, so I looked at it for a few minutes, and then my brain began to hum. Something funny; something funny about a plant. Something involving a British officer in World War II, making a side trip from Cairo. Patrick Leigh Fermor? No. But who, then? I remembered that the passage about the plant was killingly funny, on the order of Evelyn Waugh funny, whereas most of the book’s humor was more discreetly shaded. Then: Bingo! John Carey. The Unexpected Professor. The book did not take long to find, because I was reading other books by Carey when we moved into this apartment, and his memoir of teaching had been shelved not where it belonged, but where it could easily be found. Wonder of wonders, it hadn’t budged. I pulled it down and quickly found the passage, still hilarious, which concerns the health of the Burning Bush, still preserved at St Catherine’s, and which you can read here (scroll down to the indentation). All this happened within five minutes of my laying eyes on the photograph of the monastery.
In other words, throw order and system to the winds, and go with complete idiosyncrasy. It reminds me of this Avengers plot. I’m talking about the great Sixties show that is with us no more, because all the films were destroyed in a warehouse fire. In the plot, important business men were driven mad — to their deaths — by a beautiful secretary. She would come in and reorganize their files so that only she knew where to find anything. Then she would disappear. Diana Rigg saved the day by impersonating her somehow — a dangerous job, as usual. My Lord, how I loved Diana Rigg.
But as it’s my library, it won’t matter that nobody else knows where anything is.
***
I took a vacation day yesterday. It would have been a sick day had I felt sick, but the truth is that I did not have the energy to be sick. I slept until 11:30. Then I wrote yesterday’s double-barreled entry, and wasn’t done with that until four. I decided to watch a movie. The movie I decided to watch was Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. This is a difficult film to follow, because the dialogue is a chain of seventeenth-century conceits, and the sound is not very clear. The camera work is lovely, but it’s hard to make out what the characters are saying. (It would be difficult to understand even if you could grasp their every word, what with Peter Greenaway &c.) I wanted to see the movie because I was in the mood for Janet Suzman’s voice. Actually, everything that Janet Suzman said could be understood perfectly. She had a lovely if world-weary speech about pomegranates and greenhouses toward the end.
The action of The Draughtsman’s Contract takes place at a red-brick country house of modest proportions. The draughtsman is contracted to draw twelve views of it, so between that and the filmmaker’s interest in baroque aesthetics there are many long looks at the building. It did not take long for me to sense a familiarity. The oddly-placed window on one façade was as evocative as a long-forgotten name or a wisp of music. I knew that I had seen that wall, with its oddly-placed window, somewhere else. Then there was the entrance porch, ambitious but undersized. Could it be —
Could it be Groombridge Place? I’ve never been to Groombridge Place, but it’s the house on the dust jacket of one of my old daydream books, Country Houses From the Air, a bonbon published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1994. (It goes without saying that these are English country houses.) There’s another photograph, also taken from the air by Jason Hawkis, inside the book. Putting the DVD on pause, I went to get the book — I knew where it was because I’d been pawing over it just last week, whilst reading about Victoria Sackville-West and Knole, another Country House — and there could be no doubt. Groombridge Place is a moated manor house in Kent, an accumulation of additions and alterations that stopped just before the Eighteenth Century. For many years, I could not look at pictures of it without sighing very deeply. I liked to think that this was where Roger Carbury lived, in The Way We Live Now — but Trollope never shut up about hating red brick. I liked to think that this was where I, as a result of magical circumstances, might find myself living someday, somehow. A moat, even!
Now I cannot imagine living in any country house. I can certainly imagine visiting one, provided that all the mod cons are en suite. But a few days, a week at most — that would be enough. I’d be much more drawn, nowadays, to an imposing house in a small town, like the famous Lamb House at Rye, home to Henry James and E F Benson. Say what you will about country houses, they are usually in the middle of nowhere. I’d want to be able to do my own shopping, on foot.
In fact, I no longer have daydreams about living anywhere else. This is surely a function of age. It’s amazing, how appealing familiarity becomes with age. And, when I think about it, I realize that I have just experienced magical circumstances, whereby, without my going very far, all my belongings have been given a new finish by transposition into a different apartment, in which everything fits, almost as if purchased for the purpose, because everything that didn’t fit was dumped.
Of course, I wondered where I’d seen Anthony Higgins before, too. He played the draughtsman — the ill-fated draughtsman. But what else? Scrolling through IMDb, I came across a string of unfamiliar titles. But two I knew, and while I couldn’t immediately place him in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I knew immediately who he played in The Young Sherlock Holmes, still a rather terrific movie. He played the villain, the corrupt pagan who sacrificed pretty virgins to Egyptian deities in a magnificent temple constructed in the middle of commercial London. Like the draughtsman, he came to a bad end.
In the movie, the draughtman’s drawings are burned. One by one, we see the clues to a murder (about which the draughtsman himself was clueless) consumed by the flames. I like to think that the actual drawings have been beautifully framed, and grace the wall of a handsome residence. But, what with Peter Greenaway &c —