Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
is a sign of the depth of communist influence, even now, in England.’
Nothing is given. I leave the house to walk across London to somewhere on the edges of Hammersmith, where I am living with Sarah Raven, the woman for whom, a few months previously, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw. Sarah has gone somewhere else this evening, to have dinner with friends, and won’t be back until midnight or later. I have left as early as I can from the Mayfair house and think ‘Why not?’ A warm night. A walk through London and its glitter in the dark, to expunge that padded house and all its upholstered hostilities.
There are whores in the street outside, bending down like mannequins to the windows of the slowing cars. Some of the women are so tall and so sweetly spoken they can only be men, with long, stockinged calves and a slow flitter to their eyes. One fixes me straight. ‘Looking for company?’ she asks. ‘Thank you, not tonight, thanks,’ and we move on.
I walk down Park Lane, where the cars are thick and the night heavy. The lights from the cars blip, blip, blip through the dark. Life is hurried. I pass the Dorchester and the Hilton, down to the corner where the subway drops into ungraffitied neon. Down and up and down again to the upper parts of Knightsbridge. Along there the windows gleam. A friend of mine has opened a shop in Beauchamp Place. It is lacquered scarlet inside and beautiful, with black Japanese furniture standing on the hard-wood floor.
On and out, increasingly out, away from the polish of the glimmer-zone, made shinier at night, to the open-late businesses of South Ken, where Frascati and champagne stand cooled in ranks behind glass and the Indian at the till leaves a cigarette always smoking on the ledge beside him. On, out, westwards, where occasional restaurants are all that interrupt the domestic streets now tailing into dark. The pubs have shut. It is nearing midnight.
For a stretch the street lights are broken, perhaps two in a row, and it is darker here. I think nothing of it. My mind is on other things. On what? I was thinking of a place where I have been happy, some kind of mind-cinema of it flicking through my brain: sitting back on the oars in the sunshine in a small boat off the coast of some islands in the Hebrides, where black cliffs drop into a sea the colour of green ink and the sea caves at their feet drive 50 yards or more into pink, coralline depths.
That night I was thinking of these things, of hauling crabs from the sea, scrambling among the hissing shags and peering down the dark slum tunnels where the puffins live, lying down in the long grass while the ravens honked and flicked above me and the buzzards cruised. My mind was away there that night.
I must fight a reluctance to describe what followed. I am wearing a suit, an Italian suit I have had for years, with turn-ups to the trousers and pointed tips to the lapels. It is a sharkish, double-breasted thing. The Mayfair whores had seen a businessman inside it and so, I suppose, did the three youths, late teenagers, in the Lillie Road.
The heels of my shoes were striking the pavement too hard, like flints. I tried to soften them by treading on the balls of my feet. Two of the boys were on the inside of the pavement next to the wall. I did not look at them. The other was on the kerb. I walked between the three as though through an alley and adrenalin shocked into me as I saw their eyes go white in the unlit street. I saw the kerbside boy nod at the others. I thought how contemptible was my Daily Mail fear of these people. I was already beyond them, and relieved, when my eyes and mouth stung and burned and there were hurried hands under my armpits pulling and pushing me into the mouth of a passageway leading off the road. My body had hunched over as the ammonia came into my face – bleach squirted from a lemon squeezer – and they knelt me on the gritty pavement, as though I were being unpacked, a bale of stuff, my body and suit a pocketed rucksack, all hurry and hard fingers against my ribs. I said nothing. I tried to get up but they rubbed the bleach into my eyes, oddly without violence, in the way you would pull back on the chain of a dog, simply a control.
I was not a person but a suit with pockets. I was being fleeced, in the way a shepherd might fleece a sheep. My assets were being stripped. I knelt with the grit of the pavement pricking in my cheek while they looked for money and objects in the suit that was no longer mine. They were robbing the suit. The bleach had emptied it of a person, I could not help but regard from a distance this odd, disembodied theft. I was in pain but the burning in my eyes and mouth seemed unrelated to this professional going-over of my clothes, not my clothes, the clothes, some clothes.
They left, up the passageway. I lay for a moment on the concrete slabs, excited by the reality of what had happened. My eyes were blurry and my tongue was ulcered and raw. I can taste and smell the ammonia now, years afterwards, a chemical thickness to it, a fog of fumes rising from my mouth into my nose. I got up. I dusted the suit off; it was torn. I walked down to the North End Road. There was a fish-and-chip shop open there. I went in and asked the man behind the counter if I could wash my face in his basin. He looked at me. His apron was up around his armpits. ‘We’ve been messing about a bit, have we?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been fucking attacked.’
He showed me a room which had a basin and a towel in it. I washed there, deep in the water, holding the water to my face and eyes, wanting to wash the pain away, and the taste of the bleach, and the furry, clogged thickness on my tongue, but feeling, more than anything, broken, hopeless, at the end of a long and hopeless trajectory which, for many months and even years, had curved only down.
I walked to the house. It wasn’t far. I sat down on the doorstep. I said to myself I was fine. But I knew I wasn’t and eventually ended up in hospital where, at three in the morning, a doctor hosed the ammonia from my eyes, holding them open with his rubber-gloved fingers one by one, so that the water would sluice around the recesses of the eye. By pure chance, the doctor told me, precisely the same thing had happened to him the year before. Some Spurs fans had set upon him, squirted his eyes with bleach, robbed him and left him feeling blurry like this on the pavement. It was his way of consoling me, I suppose.
Only later, in Sarah’s bed, deep in the night, with the grey-yellow wash of the London street lights leaking around the edges of the curtains, did I allow myself to cry, to sob out all the held-back reservoir of humiliation and failure whose dam the mugging had broken.
It was not the attack itself for which I wept and sweated that night but everything of which it seemed, however irrationally, a culmination: the failure of my first marriage the year before, my guilt at my own part in that failure, the effect my leaving would have on my three sons by that marriage, the failure or near-failure of a business I had been involved with for five years, which I had also abandoned, unable to work properly any longer, leaving it in the hands of my cousin and co-director at the one moment he most needed my help. On top of that, a book I had been trying and failing to write had finally collapsed in exhaustion and uncertainty. If I had been a horse I would have been shot. I should have been shot. I had broken down.
The mugging was a catalyst not of change, but of paralysis. I scarcely moved for three months. I lay in bed. Sarah went alone to work and to parties. I saw in her face a terror of what she had allowed into her life. I let everything about me – my own work, my sense of self-esteem, any idea of care or responsibility for others – fall away. Nothing meant anything to me. I could make no decisions. When I met people I knew, they looked into my face as though something were missing there. I woke up tired. I spoke more slowly than before. I saw a psychotherapist and told him that I felt like a sooted chimney, nothing but a dusty black hollow cylinder inside my skin. I felt that my breath polluted the air around me. I dreamed of my children. One night we were walking in a rocky place like Crete. ‘I am sorry,’ I told them. ‘I must leave you behind,’ and without waiting for an answer set off up the side of a mountain which reminded me of Mount Ida, its dry, limestone bulk, its sterility, its demand to be climbed. I arrived at the chapel on the summit, a place of bare rock, and slumped down beside the walls, my face in my hands, my body with every muscle slackened, every limb like a bone in a bag. When I looked up, I saw the three boys coming towards me, easily moving up on to the final rise, a bobbing movement, alive, lightened, untaxed by the journey on which I had deserted them. ‘Why do divorced men become obsessed by their children?’ I heard a woman ask. I could have told her: because they watch them from what seems like the far side of death.
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