A trip down memory lane . . .
HIS name is Steve and he’s the only man I know who’s had his portrait painted. Properly. In oils. On canvas. By a man with a beard and a smock and a palette of smeared paint in one hand and a brush in the other.
And that portrait has been hung on a wall as the latest in a line of portraits that stretches back to the 16th century, forming an unbroken string of headmasters at one of the great British public schools. It isn’t Eton, and it isn’t Harrow, but it’s up there with both of them in rank if not prestige.
Steve’s my age, more or less exactly. We were at university together. He was always going to teach and obviously he’s done well at it. So well indeed that he’s retired already, his working life is over, and he and his wife have begun their drift on the oceans of free time by taking themselves off to the other end of the planet, to the fabled lands they call New Zealand. And they have rented a car and driven round the North Island where they went to the Coromandel and to Rotorua and to Taupo, and are now driving round the South, where they will go to Queenstown and to Doubtful Sound and to several other places you can guess.
And somehow Steve got to hear that I live in these parts and though we haven’t met for 40 years he thought it might be good to get in touch and when I got the email I replied immediately suggesting we meet in Lyttelton to drink too much shiraz and Steve said good, yes let’s.
Memory’s a strange thing. As I set off last night for the bar I cast about for memories of Steve and fresh as yesterday I remembered a meal. It was a tinned meat pie, heated in boiling water, with a mound of instant mashed potato and reconstituted peas that you boiled with sugar and salt, and I cooked it, if cooked is the word, in the little kitchen that I shared with the other rooms on my landing and I took the plate to my room and put it on my desk beside the wardrobe. I fetched a book to read while I was eating, and folded the book flat and wedged it under the rim of the plate and picked up my knife and fork and whoa, the wardrobe doors burst open and out of them roared I didn’t momentarily know what or whom, but it was bearded.
Such a shock today would probably kill me. Back then I had a heart as strong as a trampoline, but still I jumped and screamed and felt my physiology go into instant panic. And even though in seconds I had realised it was Steve — who’d come to see me, spotted me in the kitchen and snuck into my room and hidden in the wardrobe for the fun of it — within those seconds I entirely lost my appetite.
In the bar we recognised each other straight away. And it was immediately apparent how evenhanded time is. Though Steve and I have been half a globe apart for 40 years, time’s dealt to us in lockstep. With perfect synchronicity it’s plucked our hair out, bulged our bellies, begun to hunch our spines, and gone to work on our prostate glands.
It’s remarkable how little time it takes to summarise a life. I’d taught a bit then written. He’d taught a bit then risen. He’d fathered three children. I’d buried three dogs. And that was about that.
We spoke of mutual acquaintances: who’d died, who’d thrived, who’d disappeared. Inevitably we reminisced. It’s a harmless pastime. But it only underlines the fallibility of memory. Do you remember, said Steve, sleeping on the pavement outside a Paris metro station?
And as he said it, yes I did. I felt again the cold of the concrete through my thin red sleeping bag and the rough canvas of the rucksack I used as a pillow. And I remembered waking to a forest of legs as the early workers waited for the gates to open and the trains to start back up. But I didn’t remember Steve.
Were you there? I said. Obviously, he said.
I guess you must have been, I said, but for the life of me I would have said I’d been alone. And neither of us could remember why we were in Paris then, or where we’d been or where we were headed.
Most things are forgotten. What’s remembered is misremembered. History’s an agreed fiction. Time rolls on. It’s nice to drink shiraz and laugh a bit. And none of it matters at all, even if you’ve had your portrait painted.