Free Loving Monsters by James Hamilton-Paterson

looked on the place as temporary. For them it was the view down that was misty and unreal while the peaks overhead sparkled enticingly. Where else to go but up?–
    But you were not one of those either.
    – No. I was as bored with the mountain as I am by this metaphor. For me the only way from this ledge was outward. Far horizons. The blue empyrean. Follow the heart, though heed the head’s directions. All that. But heavens, the propaganda one had to hold out against! One of those frightful hymns we had to sing at school had a verse which went something like:
    Not for ever by still waters
    Would we idly rest and stay;
    But would smite the living fountains
    From the rocks along our way.
    A pretty clear statement of the Protestant work ethic, even if it does sound as though it’s recruiting hydrologists for the Third World. Excelsior! Onward and upward! I didn’t fancy a life smitingrocks so I said goodbye to Beechill Road and went off to Suez. My father had leaned on someone in Anderson & Green, the Orient Line’s owners, to give me an office job. Something to do with coaling. He thought I would go, find Suez a hell-hole, and after salutary bouts of homesickness and malaria come back with my tail between my legs, my lust for dreaming satisfied and eager to settle down to a sensible career. –

    Leaning back in his chair Jayjay smiles with a sad shake of his head as though he can see his father’s figure superimposed on the Valle di Chio and acknowledge without rancour the man’s blameless misjudgement of a son he never understood. Smoke tumbles upwards from a bonfire of last year’s brambles Claudio has lit down by the orto. Long-dead fathers and their long-dead wishes dissolve into a cloudless blue sky. From within the house come faint domestic sounds as Marcella goes about her cleaning, which presumably includes polishing Lady Amelia’s dildo. On aspring morning towards the end of his life this man is gazing outwards from his terrace with an expression more private and excluding than his frank manner implies, but this is to be expected in the presence of a comparative stranger and with so long a stretch of time sending up its inner wafts. As I glance covertly at him a fleeting facial resemblance reminds me of that famously ambiguous photograph by Islay Lyons of Norman Douglas at the age of eighty staring (maybe seeingly, maybe not) at a bust of himself aged ten. The bust is in the foreground and, as the cynosure, it would seem to dominate the picture. Yet it is the marble boy’s older self we look at as he appears to contemplate his former likeness from behind a grandfather’s disguise. His expression is unreadable, meaning we can read into it any from a swift list of possible interpretations, beginning with melancholy and passing through mischief. (Is that a knowing smile hovering in the great nose’s shadow? Wry amusement that, given the impossible chance, he would cheerfully have bedded his earlier self with full legal rights over his own flesh and blood?) Or finally, is he even looking at the child at all? Those eyes could long have skidded off the bust’s left shoulder and the downward gaze be fixed reflectively on the unseeable vanishing point of eighty years. Nothing is clear except the strikingness of the composition with its two different yet identical subjects, both allotropes of the same elemental person. That and the chasm it shares with the viewer.
    And now Jayjay is gazing at the sky with an amiably frozen expression which might be that of an old rogue peering down wells of his former iniquities or else evidence of a sudden minor stroke. Today the biographer feels belligerent. He wants clarity. He has the urge to toss all manner of fig leaves and olive branches into the flames.
    No, why did you really go to Suez? Was it for sex?
    – That’s your entire month’s vulgarity allowance used up. –
    Merely taking your cue, Jayjay. You were the one who told me at our very first meeting that you had