XI
1982
Conducting an inventory. At forty I have debts of £2,000 to the bank and a further £1,000 to friends. I have no stable income, and although Nicholas hopes to sort things out in Rome, it is always tomorrow. I’m stuck with this project like an iron lung – it’s too late to go back, and in any case, impossible to think of anything until Caravaggio is completed. I have no car or television. There is no office except for this room, which is eighteen by fifteen feet, painted white and rented. It has a walk-in bathroom and kitchen. There are four built-in cupboards. One is full of paintings by friends. The second is filled with manuscripts for the films. The third contains props and clothes, and the fourth, my Super 8 films and equipment. I’ve a stereo player with about one hundred tapes, and bookcases with about six hundred books. These are mostly psychology, religious, and architectural texts, biography and art books. There is a large section on Egypt and nineteenth-century exploration, some poetry, and next to no novels. There is a fold-up bed, two chairs, a metal office desk, and some carpenters’ stools from the old studio. The pictures on the walls are my own, except for the portrait photo of a young man by Angus McBean. On the mantelpiece above the fire are a folding lantern, a vase of mimosa, an African ceremonial sword carved roughly from an ivory tusk, a flint from Preston, a silvered glass candlestick, and a pewter patten with a Greek inscription. Near the stereo are several treasured objects. A gold leaf from a Greek funerary crown, Anthony’s Japanese tea-bowl, and an eighteenth-century plaster cast of the Portland vase. On the window is the friendship tree that Güta Minton gave me in 1965 – beside it the silver lacquer cupboard with my clothes – finally, on the floor, is the plaster cast head of Mausolus with a pink shell balancing on its head.
There is little or no colouring in this room, and the polished wood of the carpenters’ stools gives it a slightly monastic look which is reinforced by the pictures and objects, mainly black and silver grey, like the bead altar flowers from Rome which glitter in the night light and the singing saw which stands by the fire.
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A year has passed and I’ve a new chair that Andy has made, and a video monitor which is not connected to Central Control.
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