A Day In The Garden With George.

George is singing in the shower. Mostly he sings along to whatever is on Radio 2. He likes middle-of-the-road music; it suits him. Above all he sings to take his mind off his ageing, sagging body, trusting that by the time he has finished showering the mirror will be too steamed up for him to see himself in it. This morning however he is singing snippets of half-remembered arias from La Boheme and Tosca. For some reason he is in a reflective and nostalgic mood. Often lately he has caught himself thinking about the past, which is where the opera comes in. It was seeing Gianni Schicchi all those years ago that started it. Now whenever he hears ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ he weeps. He’s not sure why, but he can’t resist it. It’s an enjoyable teariness, leaving in its wake a sense of gentle melancholy. He gets out of the shower and dresses slowly and carefully even though it’s Saturday - white shirt, striped tie, charcoal suit, black socks, polished black shoes – takes a single sidelong glance in the steamy mirror. A petulant, mocking voice rings in his head, ‘very handsome George, I always say a man should take an interest in his appearance.’
The words echo in his mind as he closes the flat door and briskly descends the three flights of stairs to the front door. On the street George marvels, not for the first time, at the coincidence of his surname – Peabody. Not that anybody these days was likely to know or care that he shares a name with someone who, in Victorian times, endowed numerous blocks of subsidised dwellings for the artisans and labouring poor of London. George rents one of these now much-sought-after ‘dwellings’ even though he is an artisan only in the sense that he practises an art. Outside George is engulfed by the racket and stink of the market; Chinese musicians are playing a strange ethereal music that drifts on the breeze like smoke. There are jugglers and tumblers and stilt-walkers. The streets hum with the exotic and the elegant. The air reeks of pot-pourri and pungent soaps; it’s like some oriental bazaar.
Deep in thought he walks into the Central Market and stops at the wine bar with the ridiculous name, The Crustaceous Pipe or some such nonsense. Grumpily he slumps down at a table remembering when it was all just fruit and vegetables. He orders some wine, which he slowly sips. He uncaps his fountain pen and begins to trace fine curlicues and arabesques on the paper napkin. And, so occupied, George is oblivious to all around him. He only vaguely registers that the juggling has stopped and an operatic duo are singing Puccini. Then, ripping through his consciousness, come the opening bars of ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’. Tears begin to trickle from his eyes and drip onto his beautiful calligraphy; soon it is all washed away.

For the second time that day he can hear his mother’s querulous voice nagging just as it always used to.
... George, don’t be so wet! You know there’s no money in painting, not unless you mean house painting, that’s only for nobs not for the likes of you. What you want is something steady...
... You know I can’t eat fried fish George; it lays on my chest something horrible...
... I know she’s a lovely girl George but she’s not right for you. She’s foreign. She’s a bleedin’ Chink for God’s sake. Not that I mind Chinks, better than Blacks anyway. But really George what are you thinking of? What can she see in you? It won’t last you’ll see. One of her brothers’ll come and slice you up one dark night, you see if he won’t...
... George nip out and get me some fags and a bag of my toffees will you? My legs are giving me gyp something chronic...
George’s mother has been dead these past ten years but that hasn’t put a stop to her incessant niggling.
George was born in Covent Garden, has been there all his life. His mother was born in Covent Garden too; a costermonger’s child. He never found out who his father was. The tenancy of the flat was an original one handed down the generations of the deserving labouring poor until it finally reached George who is neither labouring nor poor. Always a dreamy and artistic child, he spent all his spare time reading and drawing; dreamt that one day he would get to Art School and become a proper artist. Mother had different ideas, and before the ink was dry on his school leaving certificate she’d chatted up Joe Miles, Father of the Chapel at the Times and got George a place as an apprentice compositor.
...You should be bloody grateful to get a job in the print George, it’s steady work with prospects. Other kids have to have their names put down at birth - like Eton College...
So that was that. He didn’t complain; there didn’t seem much point once she’d made up her mind.
By the time he had worked out his apprenticeship he’d discovered a fascination with letters and fonts, noticed that the local college ran an evening class in calligraphy and signed up for it. It was here that he met Maggie. Maggie Xiang taught the class in Chinese calligraphy, which wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, having a fancy for learning gothic scripts and the like, but one look at Maggie changed his mind completely. She was as beautiful and as delicate as the Chinese ideograms that she painstakingly taught him to reproduce. She told him that an ancient Chinese philosopher, Wang Hse-chi, had once said that calligraphy ‘elevates the soul and illuminates the feelings’.
The grace and simplicity of these words had a powerful effect on George. From then on he thought only of Maggie and how he might articulate his love for her in every brushstroke of his work. He dreamt of marrying Maggie and becoming a Master of Calligraphy. Inevitably the reality of day to day life intervened; though it didn’t so much shatter the dream as gradually pollute it with the seeping greyness of prudent commonsense. Even so, whatever spare time he had was taken up with calligraphy and thoughts of Maggie; becoming something of an expert in both. In time his mother found out about Maggie, as she found out about everything. She wasn’t pleased. So George was surprised when, in an uncharacteristically hospitable moment, she suggested that he invite Maggie round for Sunday tea at the flat. It was a catastrophe. He saw Maggie only once again after that. In a lavish consolatory gesture he bought two tickets, at enormous expense, to see Gianni Schicchi at the Royal Opera House. The evening was a huge success; George couldn’t remember when he’d been so happy. As he walked Maggie back to her flat in Tavistock Street he seemed to float on candyfloss clouds.
The following week Maggie got on a plane back to Hong Kong and that was the last he heard of her. Of course he made attempts to contact her, but it was as if a great blank wall had been built up between them, it was as if she had never existed. He later found out that her brothers had also left London, sold the restaurant – disappeared. No one knew where they went. George and his mother continued much as before. ‘We’re very close you know’, she would tell anyone who wanted to hear. He kept up with the calligraphy at first as a comforting way of connecting with Maggie, but as the memories of Maggie gradually faded calligraphy took over and became his consuming passion, and he became very good at it indeed. In fact, for a while, he became quite famous, even had an exhibition at a new local gallery; all white walls and black and steel furniture. Mother came to the private view, but it wasn’t a success. She couldn’t understand why all these strangers were so excited by the bits of black scrawl that George had hung on the walls, she couldn’t stand the chilled sauvignon that they gave her to drink; ‘this is piss George. Can’t I have a glass of stout?’ After that George didn’t have any more exhibitions, but gradually, by word-of-mouth his work became much sought-after by the metropolitan cognoscenti.
Mother refused to let George’s success go to his head, said he shouldn’t give up the day job, said it would be mad to leave the print, especially when she’d had to work so hard to get him in there in the first place. Strangely enough the fact that he was a skilled working man as well as a talented artist had a perverse kind of cachet. George was interviewed by the quality press as well as the style-conscious glossies. His photo was on the front of the Sunday Times weekend magazine. He became an unlikely, if ephemeral, element in the heady spirit of ‘swinging London’. His name mentioned along with the clutch of working class photographers, actors, pop stars and gangsters who were the trend setters of fashionable London society. Though this short-lived celebrity was quite enjoyable, George was relieved that by the time the market had relocated to Nine Elms the fuss had died down.
Years passed, and apart from the building of the new Market Piazza nothing much changed. George worked in Fleet Street and did his calligraphy at night. Mother was as querulous as ever, but they ‘are used to each other’. Then, quite abruptly, things happened that changed the tenor of George’s life. News International switched production of the Times and the Sun to Wapping, the Merchant Ivory version of A Room With A View was released, and the fags finally did for Mother. Fleet Street’s demise was just the trigger that George, who has no truck with modern technology, needed to leave the day job and buy a studio in the Piazza. Now that he no longer had to worry about mother he had time to ponder the wasteland of his life. One aimless evening he drifted to the cinema, ended up watching A Room With A View through a skein of tears as ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ boomed out of the sound system. On leaving the cinema he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, just inside the open door of the Ocean Pearl Chinese restaurant a calendar whose photo of the month was of a picturesque clutter of sampans in Hong Kong harbour.

George finishes the wine, folds the smeary napkin carefully into four and puts it in his pocket. Blundering out into the sunny Central Piazza he nearly collides with a crowded stall where a girl is busy transcribing names into Chinese calligraphy at £2 a time. He can’t tell whether it’s the girl’s delicate oriental beauty or her talented brushwork that is the cause of her evident popularity. Then, for some reason that he can’t quite fathom he joins the patient queue of admirers until, quite suddenly, freeze-framed in his mind’s eye he sees the picture from the calendar in the Oriental Pearl restaurant just as it was that evening the year that his mother died, and he remembers why ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ makes him cry. He remembers Maggie just as she was the night they went to the opera.
He turns away and starts walking purposefully in the direction of the Blue Horizon Travel Agent. He is going to buy a trip to Hong Kong.