The Sense of Loss

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A chair in a corner

 acrylic on hardboard, 6.12 x 4.5 cm, c. 2000 

The Sense of Loss

It was cold enough to see your breath billowing before you, with that English dampness that makes the chill so much more acute, and it was nine in the morning when that sort of cold affects one most. A fogginess made the world indistinct.

I was standing outside a furniture store on Essex Road, the sort where they put things out on the pavement for people to inspect: a heavy wardrobe, a forties wash-stand, an oil painting of Princess Diana in a Pre-Raphaelite style, an incomplete set of upholster ed chairs, a standard lamp, it's shade torn, a huge mirror in an elaborate gilt frame. I saw my face. "Hello,"  I said.

Now I was a lawyer, with a large flat and a pension plan, but in my youth I had been a rover, wandering from place to place, a pinball thrown from one temporary state to another, sometimes guided by gravity, sometimes by the will of others, rarely by my own volition.

Now I was another man. I had developed thought patterns, habits of feeling, methods. Had they merely allowed me to avoid the world? Had I become a subject of routines? Or were the routines a liberation, allowing action by delimiting it?

Yet I had not enjoyed my life as a drifter. I had wished to be settled. Ironical that now, when stasis was mine, I should regret the passing of those times. I recalled that back then I could sense very little between myself and something black and unending. But I had felt alive, compelled.

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I looked at the wardrobe, which was made of oak, with art deco details. I opened the door and saw a low cabinet for shoes, and an urge overcame me -from where I don't know- I climbed into the wardrobe and sat down on the cabinet. The door closed on me. Inside: dark, the smell of furniture polish. I drifted off.

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"Hey mate, you have to go home now, we're closing shop". The door was open. The street lamps had come on, a yellow light soft through the fog.

Blinking. "Oh, I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?"

"Six o'clock. We're closing up now"

He began to move the things into the shop. I had been asleep for hours. Stiff, cold, bleary, I went on my way. I needed something to eat.

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Desk, acrylic on hardboard, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

I was on my own  all the time. Where were my friends? Why were they always away, or impossible to contact? 

So I sat alone in one of the booths in Fratelli's and ordered mushroom soup and spaghetti carbonara and a light Chianti.

There was a article in my pocket which I had intended to read about copyright legislation. The article contained assumptions and even base inaccuracies. Why was it so difficult for anyone to write anything in a newspaper without getting something wrong? I began composing a response to the editor in my head.

My thoughts were broken by the waitress. She held out a saucer with a note on it, "Join us", it said.

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I looked across the restaurant and saw Alexander Ducloitte, a pianist friend,  dapper, smiling and beckoning. He was with another. I went over.

"Caspasian," declared Ducloitte, "meet Tadeusz Derȩgowski, the painter."

Derȩgowski smiled. We shook hands.  He wore a dark blue suit, cufflinks and a pink tie.  His glossy hair was slicked suavely back. I knew I was in the presence of colossal vanity. I had seen his strange pictures in a magazine: they depicted simple household objects which were imbued with considerable intensity. 

They were talking about money. Derȩgowski was very direct. "So, I hear you are a lawyer, how much do you make?"

 Ducloitte interjected, "Tell him to mind his own business, Caspasian, Derȩgowski's manners are atrocious." 

"It's okay, I said, I am on fifty five k." 

"Oh so, that's about a thousand a week, say seven hundred and fifty after tax," said Derȩgowski, "and you are a lawyer, not exactly the most esteemed profession, let's be frank- 10% must be to pay for the shame of it."

Ducloitte laughed, "not fair at all, not all legal work is quite so very disgraceful." 

"Well, anyway," Derȩgowski  continued, "what I mean to say is that we, who are artists and poets and whose work is taken as a yardstick to judge entire civilisations should be on at least double that, which would be roughly two k a week."

Ducloitte smiled. "No one with sense becomes an artist for the money. Anyway, we are boring Caspasian. Caspasian, how have you been? Here, try some of this, it is quite deliciously...sordid."

 He poured some wine into a glass, a vintage Sauternes: delicate, cool, sweet - and continued - "who are you passing your time with these days?"

"I am really just working..." I did not want to tell Ducloitte how lonely I had been. With a quiver of shame I remembered my sleeping earlier in the wardrobe. 

"Hmm, that sounds a bore," said Ducloite.

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We finished and went our separate ways, the coldness reduced, the fog diminished.

Wardrobe, acrylic on card, 6.5 x 9 cm, c. 2000

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