This story was first published in Ambit (225). Ambit was a quarterly literary periodical published in the United Kingdom between 1959 and 2023. Sadly, Ambit closed its doors in April 2023.

Paddington St. Looking East

None of us are here for simple reasons. Usually around August our pagan hearts tell us it’s about time so we conspire by email to meet, making the annual pilgrimage to this Paddington B&B. We eat here communally, under a nicotine-nouveau ceiling, surrounded by dining room walls sanctified by original Morris and Co. wallpaper. Only us dying cultish few acknowledge the existence of this wallpaper. Or maybe it’s that only we see on these unwashed walls a soiled bastion of good taste, a last refuge of real design. Occasionally we campaign in our own quiet way for its preservation, but we’re not a Society or Association, we only associate as devout amateur aesthetes, as feeling patrons of dead arts. Pilloried by multi-storey-minimalism and technological clobber for the rest of the year, we take this time to untomb our passion for William Morris. We join together in this strange world-old mystery of an imaginative secular mass. And in all the godless infinite space we choose this dingy B&B for a church and its dining room as our altar. With walls of bulrush and acanthus and birds more magnificent than any Medieval apse. My mantra for years while teaching industrial design at the Courtauld was this: beauty is when a pattern eats its unfeeling form. In the vegetable- oil light our eyes are milky with infant sensation, straining to stare at the wall. What life can do to these faces, I think, looking around the table, at these malformed seekers of the sublime. Our pulpy outgrowths – Baroque ears and expressionless Byzantine mouths – remind me of Holbein’s faces, but only thick industrial paint could do us justice. We’ve outgrown Kodak realism. St. Augustine said Beauty cannot be beheld in any bodily matter, so our fleshly dereliction itself should qualify us as senior beholders. With Edmund Burke’s distinction of the sublime attending near-death experience and fear – we all score highly in cancers, coronaries, strokes, anxiety – then we should also be contenders in the beautiful and sublime combined. All of us are in Act Five. But together our hypertension balances our hypotension, our inflammations and irritations (phlebitis) find some respite in chronic somnolence and numbing paraesthesia, we cancel and contract each other’s sickness. In the beginning we were a dozen strong, we had a real spectrum of souls, specialists in stained glass, indexing, Brutalism and burial rites, we had Blakean visionaries and Pharisaic arch-pedants. But we’ve had successively low turnouts for the past few years. And this year Pat – who’d been Iago at the Globe and punched Buckminster Fuller in the bollocks – said he had family things, downplaying the lethal unravelling of his middle-aged son. And Glenn – our true Morrisologist – wrote about personal problems, nothing serious, he wrote, but nothing that can wait I’m afraid (prostate). Now we’re a scattering and tired, so we’ve decided this is likely going to be our last pilgrimage.

In 1954 when workers unearthed the Temple of Mithras – not very far from here – preserved in clay for centuries deep underground, some said they saw colourfully vivid scenes of sacrifice and rebirth painted on the walls. Exposed to London’s air these images quickly eroded before their eyes, it all vanished within minutes, they reported, just a moment and they were all gone. When we leave the B&B the wallpaper corrodes like London’s Venus and Serapis exhumed, I imagine. This place will turn itself over to recreational sleepers. It’ll fall back into the blind pattern of rootless migrations from room to room, left to transient nameless one-nighters, whose faces Joe the Maltese owner won’t remember. Or Joe will do what he’s always threatened to do and paint over it. Next time we crazies pile in here, he always says, what we’ll see is Dulux Primrose. We’ve brought him identical Morris designs photographed at the Midland Grand hotel, and similar patterns used in the Kelmscott Chaucer, but when we bring these proofs to show him – look, we say, holding the photo up against the wall – he says it’s just wallpaper – wallpaper is just fucking wallpaper! I enjoy it when Joe calls us crazy. It gratifies my image of us not having succumbed to popular sanity. This year Keith’s brought Morris and Co. stock archives, facsimiles of invoices, receipts, order sheets, which he pulls out of his Betjeman-schooldays satchel like empirical explosives, hoping Joe will finally see the truth. Keith is one of our most devoted pilgrims, a fact- charged teetotaller who’s restored himself after retirement to his ordained calling of architectural history (in moneyed life he worked for the Institute of Sanitary Engineers). I know in his own way Joe loves us wrinkled pilgrims. Aside from anything else we pay and some – though not me – are wealthier than breadline pensioners. We’re also the only guests not simply passing through, Joe confesses warmly one evening. Ours are the only faces he gets used to seeing, for this one short season every year it’s a place people come to meet, otherwise it’s where they come to hole-up and be alone or sometimes worse (notoriously at this B&B in the late 90s). A lonely German expat, who only joined us a couple of times before disappearing, said of this place that in his thirty years living in England, he had found nowhere that could recreate as artfully or precisely the claustrophobia and general bleakness of his last decade in Leipzig, as here in this Paddington B&B. When we find earwigs have breached plugholes or broken ceramic in our baths and moth larvae in Utility dresser drawers, we remember what the impeccably polite German used to say in his perfect English. Nothing has been retouched since 1955. Under the post-war spell of Corbusier the entrance underwent a botched redesign, so that when you arrive a shabby shingled wall covers the prude and prurient Victorian interior. Food is not observed here as a sacrament. Joe’s dining experience reasserts the intestinal, it’s served – refried chips, powder wad soups, microwaved pies in gravy rinse – as a revelation in excremental realism, prepared in an attitude not inappropriate to our theme: Chaucer’s cook was also called out for his culinary crimes, Ian – our retired town planner – has observed. Worse, Jeff said, than your old Quick ‘n’ Filthies. Through a window at the top of the stairs you can barely trace the remains of a rockery in a garden area piled with smashed ceramic and slate tiles, invaded by rhododendron, but sunk in junk at the far end there’s a crab apple tree that stands for something. Over the years it came to stand for the ungovernable beauty that persists against such junk, I thought, but lately I’ve come to think of it as a dark sign of the high-Holocene, an empire of things, things tramping over nature, things outgrowing us. Smoking a cigarette on the tomato-coloured balcony I watch another world of diners inside the low glazed podium across the street, in a blank 5-star 12-storey slab. My other mantra at the Courtauld was: English eyes died between 1830-1890.

Last year we arranged a trip to Kelmscott Village. With enough of us to make a show of it we made our way by train and taxi, adding extra miles to our devotion, we felt at the beginning, but with a sense of conceit that grew in force as we got closer, some of us perceived the ‘fakement’ – as Morris would say – of this excursion, precisely because it was an excursion, an expedition in search of a different William Morris, which had no true path in our pilgrimage. It was a sentiment given voice by Denise, who said as we climbed the stairs to his bedroom she felt a strange deadweight here, here she felt nothing of the closeness she knew in Joe’s dining room. Some of us agreed, looking sadly at the famous four-poster bed, hearing the words embroidered in silk and wool onto the pelmet by Jane Morris after he died – And the night is a-cold, And my heart is warm – we didn’t really feel him here, none of us did. We don’t know this William Morris, we said, here it’s like someone else’s Morris. Or as Christine said: maybe this was everyone else’s William Morris, just not ours. A photo of William Morris wearing a work smock hung at the entrance to his workroom. How his arms crossed in this picture, with the drag and hang of the material, made it look like he was wearing a straightjacket. Above the neck I recognised the extinct expression present in all portraits after 1871. Draped over a chair was a smock similar to the one in the photo – grimed for effect – with gloves, and stray tools on the work surface and floor, but it all fell short of the intended impression of a busy ghost production. It made me think of his unfinished patterns, where half a bird’s brought to life, and where colour’s been carefully edged to a corner of trellis, leaving mortal blanks between shapes. Outside at the memorial cottage there was a stone relief of Morris reclined in his Utopian garden with hat and cane at his feet, looking hazily – we believed – out of the stonework at our minor suburban apocalypse. Behind us a man with a rucksack and long beard – not unlike Topsy’s – told us Morris was watching the cataclysm of the future ahead, looking forward. The tree he’s leaning on is the past, he said, that other tree blowing in the wind there with Beelzebub’s cockerel climbing up it’s the wrecking future. This is another Morris, we said to ourselves, sidling away from the backpacker. Big chubs of baptismal rain splashed our faces. We hardly said a word coming back. If we’d ever had any doubts before about how to play our small part in the universe, now we knew our terrestrial stage – where we’d find our final compensations – was in Paddington. Our last cosmic space on earth papered with eternity. Making our way back we were answering our calling as choir and congregation in Joe’s dining room. In a world so alarmingly un-visionary, unsatisfactory to old Utopians like us who once believed – stupid hope against hope – in New Jerusalem, we can settle on one small idyll space. When we got back we agreed: no more outings. We’d not sacrifice our William Morris to his image at Kelmscott, carved evangelically in stone or farcically resurrected in bog oak and coverlets and counterpoints. That wasn’t our William Morris. Here on in we go no further than the Tesco Express over the road, we said. Our orison speaks to no other William Morris than this William Morris here on the wall. How strangely the mind – that mole – builds its walls, I thought, when it was getting late. We were being ourselves again, which is really our only freedom.

Taking the early train from Canterbury East to Victoria, before taxiing to Paddington, I took a detour this year to see the four-poster bed. It’s the centrepiece of a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate Britain. Signature Pre- Raphaelite work I always find pale and juvenile – your glam Beatrix and pouty Proserpine, your sham beguiled and beloveds. What I see in Ophelia are the moments right after Millais’s final stroke, when she pulls herself gasping from the pond dripping and shivering and complaining. Or I see Lady Lilith finding split ends. It’s the craftsmanship of the table and Joseph’s tools that interest me when I look at Christ in the House of His Parents. Maybe it’s that I fail to imagine historically or feel fantastically. Solid elevations, graspable material mass, these are my fixes. Our intestinal identities are medieval – I believe – and the seat of the medieval soul has a solid spiritual build. In any event all I came to see was Morris’s bed and bypass the rest. Later, sitting in the dining room with Denise, Christine, Keith, Ian and Jeff, I explain how it bothered me, seeing the bed there in the exhibition, and how all I could think was – this is a different bed. Not a thing was really out of place, I go on, but somewhere between the bedchamber and the Tate it’d lost something, something got wiped off in the process of dismantling and reassembling the bed. I started to imagine how they did it. Saw a clinical team of experts, none of them knowing how important their hands were, all busy with covers, pillows, curtains, packing and boxing and bundling into a white van. The oak and silk on linen and counterpoints and pelmet, work of insatiable fingers, has to be handled with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements. They perform a dual task, I say, historically assigned to yeomen bedgoers and hangers, who used to be employed by medieval Lords to truss their beds in sacks for travelling, a long, painstaking, but common procedure in those days. And I think of these modern yeomen going about their tasks – hooking, fastening, hanging, screwing – in the exhibition room, putting it back together again, and I think did they see it too: something missing, did they know in their guts it wasn’t right, however they looked at it did they see, I wondered, but secretly kept it to themselves, knowing as I knew when I came into the room, that something was missing? They congratulate themselves but inside have that bad feeling, like they’ve sabotaged a sacred thing, besmirched, I say, a thing of beauty. Maybe they go down to the carport, retracing their steps to the van, just in case, but find the van gone? None of them can put their finger on it, neither could I for a long time. And I stood there staring for fifteen, twenty minutes, straining to see, before I finally saw. What’s missing: wallpaper. That bed’s nothing without the room, I thought. Just as the room’s really nothing without Morris. I wish you were all there with me, I say, looking around the gallery I wanted to shout the wallpaper! but they were all stupid, staring idols. I wanted you all to be there so I had someone to tell who’d understand, when I said the wallpaper! So I left to come straight here, and I couldn’t be happier, I say, raising my glass – Cheers! To our William Morris says Jeff. To the wall. And to Glenn and Pat. Cheers! To the Leipziger. To Jane and May! By Christ to us! says Keith. To Joe. To Ophelia. To saints and pagans and pilgrims. Cheers! To the end of the world’s weird edge! To that Crab Apple tree redeemer. And here’s to our last, says Denise, let’s make it count. Cheers! The strict English line drawn between the imaginary and real vanishes here. We’ve grown out of adulthood and submit to our child poet, our shrunken visionary drowned deep in reflux acids and state pensions. We sit by William Morris’s bedside in his final days, when he thought his bed – that bed – was the ship Diane, we sail with him in his delirium, coasting the Garonne off Norway on our way to Reykjavík. And although pleuritic Hardy was right – as Ian is given to letting us know when he’s feeling rum low – that the bold idealists got it wrong when they thought the world was made to be a comfortable place for man (the Immanent Will is blind, Ian likes to say), it’s enough to know that there’s one wall somewhere – a sensorium of the extinct soul – made for us and our eternal gawping. I once asked a painter friend of mine, many years ago, why she chose to be dirt poor and obscure, why when with very little adjustment or sacrifice she could easily have been much better off – that’s how I put it crudely back then – she chose to do what she did in the dark, doing your St. Cuthbert pitch? is what I said. She said all you really need is one wall to bang your head against, it doesn’t matter how long it takes or how much it hurts, just a crack, that’s all it takes, she said, but it’s your wall. She was one of the world’s great perceivers and feelers, I came to see too late, driven like Morris to undo the world’s delusions, but done to death by it. After midnight Joe hustles us off to bed. Under the itchy army-drab sheets the painter’s words send me off.

Dreamt of walking barefoot over the Dartford Bridge in a deluge, driven by an unspecified but, as it seemed, unquestionable determination to get across, I’m unwittingly led by the polite Leipziger back to the beginning on the Kent side where I started, only to have to start over again. The Thames quickly rises, flooding the bridge, and increasingly violent currents pull me under. Submerged in the first phase of consciousness I come down late to breakfast. Last to arrive, I find everyone standing huddled around the wall. Joe’s shouting in Maltese through the food hatch. Seeing me groggily trying to make sense of the scene, still surreally half drowned in dream, they part to reveal a 2ft square hole in the wall. A perfectly square black cavity. All eyes are on Joe, who, Jeff says, violently protested his innocence for half an hour before laying the blame on us – calling us what have you, saying we’d sabotaged his hotel to get our hands on it, anything and everything under the sun, says Christine, he said we’d be going nowhere until we owned up, one of us or all of us – vandals, crazies, criminals – he hasn’t stopped, listen. We weren’t going anywhere, he’ll have our rooms searched, our cases, come what may he’ll have the police here, he says, if it comes to that. None of us move. Communed around the hole we’re a different sort of congregation than we were last night, we mourn silently, stunned by a loss that’s inexpressibly physical. I wish one of us did this. I want one of us to be guilty. Capable. Are any of us spirited with cunning enough to carry it off, to mastermind something like this and get away with it, who has that energy left? How any of us combined could excavate anything this size in the night – it’s a deep hole gouged out, it’d take real heft and clout – I can’t picture it. Joe asks who’s first, so I escort him up to my room. I expose dirt along the skirting, we put up with this for the sake of William Morris, I say, for no other reason, none of the channels work either, I demonstrate with the remote, you have any idea what a dump this really is, what racket you’re running here? He snoops with ballistic zeal through my case, turns over the mattress, looks behind the dresser, silently inspects every corner of the room. In turn the others are marched upstairs with a mixture of amusement, amazement and livid horror in Denise’s case, just at the thought of Joe rummaging through her things, though within an hour we’re all acquitted. After we’ve all had the treatment Joe looks exhausted. Defeated, he brings the breakfast things to the table. We hardly eat, watching the wall over our cups as we sip, chewing and listening, as though a voice might echo from inside, like the wall carved itself a mouth in the night to say the unsaid, if only we listen. It’s just us here, which isn’t unusual, but in this static silence I understand what it’s like when Joe’s alone, the rest of the year it’s like this, I think. In the grand scheme of the B&B’s disrepair other guests will think nothing of the hole. Joe’s retail traffic won’t think anything more of the hole than they do metabolised dust or moths. It’ll only be us who see this hole as the profound absence of the wallpaper nobody else sees.

Days after I email Glenn the news he sends me a postcard. It’s an old black and white postcard of ‘The Country Churchyard’ of St. Giles, Stoke Poges, with a quiet view of the church front, stained glass, tower, headstones, cypresses and Douglas-firs. It’s only later that I learn from his widow Francesca he died in St. Giles hospice. On the postcard he wrote that when he got thinking about the done and dusted, as it’s in our nature to do at a time like this, he thought all the wallpaper in the world can’t help the great hole. Our wide wombs of uncreated night are really just peepholes of the soul. We belong with John Guest, he wrote, to the unhappiness of the past. Just don’t forget in the land of the blind the wall-eyed man is king.

Some of us still visit the B&B every now and then. Francesca joins me one afternoon to remember her husband, where he was happiest of all here in the dining room, she says. Just being here fills a multitude of voids. We peek behind the frame Joe now uses to cover the hole – a mottled etching of From Pentonville Road looking west: evening by John O’Connor – and I tell her what I like to do is write a few words on a napkin or scrap of paper, which we do, scrunch it up and roll it between your fingers until it’s as small as it can be, like this, now make a wish and flick it in the hole. When you do it say a name or invoke the names of loved ones or lost pilgrims, in the spirit of pilgrimage, and flick it in the hole when Joe’s not looking, like this – William Morris, I say – which she does, whispering her husband’s name over and over until the name’s annihilated by the sound.