The Atlantic Ocean Read online

  You often see those flowers now. They don’t mark soldiers – they mark the fall of people in ordinary life. People who are heroic only in the matter of their having met a surprising death: a car out of nowhere; a gang of crazy youths. Those flower shrines started to appear these last few years: at the sites of football stadium disasters; at the spot where a child was killed. And now they are everywhere in England. They are anonymous expressions of sympathy, from one passer-by to another. People come with those flowers as if it were an old-fashioned thing to do: laying flowers at the spot where some piece of random violence took place. As if to say, ‘We didn’t used to live like this’. As if to say, ‘Let these flowers remind you of what is best in us’.

  The people bending there, they act as if they know the flowers on the road could just as easily be piled for them. It is an odd – and oddly compulsive – piece of stage business in the televised culture. Many people use flowers much as they always did. But everything is touched by the new floriation. England suffers bouts of false-memory syndrome. It thinks it remembers flowers, and an age of innocence; it recalls an open-air festival of clean living, and no murders. It knows of a world that was never here, a time when everybody was one, and it marks that time’s passing with cellophaned flowers. The pinning of flowers on the palace gates looked like a quiet revolution. It looked like people saying something large in one voice. But it was all in the mind, and all in the mind of television. The flowers were just flowers, and the people bored.

  New Covent Garden Market is a gigantic cave of flowers; it lights up while London sleeps. The perfume near knocks you over. Forty or more large wholesalers, their flowers and plants spilling over, lying out in boxes, stacked in high bins. Lilac orchids, red amaryllis, yellow narcissus, pink ranunculus, frosted eucalyptus, a world of roses, a globe of tulips. Lilies.

  ‘A bit wet outside,’ said Helen Evans, one of the market’s employees. All the stand-holders know her. She moves in a cloud of winks and jokes and early-morning hellos. She has noticed the strangeness and importance of the English drama about flowers. It may be to do with memory, or the culture. ‘But the weird thing,’ she said, ‘is that they don’t buy a lot of flowers. They spend less on flowers than almost every country in Europe. The overall retail market is worth £1,240 million per year; about £22 per person a year. But that is not high. The English love flowers – they may think a lot about them – but they don’t buy them in a big way.’ The Swiss spend £102 per person; the Germans £57; the Dutch £47; the French £40. But the English market is growing bit by bit. The market has doubled since 1986.

  As for our bunch of white lilies, the lid was off the carton, which sat on the wet concrete. Each stem of the bunch looked pert. They seemed a darker green in the English light. They lay in the stand of S. Robert Allen Ltd, one of the market’s big wholesale firms, and were surrounded by blooms from everywhere. The traffic is conducted by Roy Stevens. ‘We live by the weather,’ he said. ‘Too hot, and the flowers are dead on the street; too rainy, and the people won’t bother stopping for flowers. It’s like that in Britain. I mean, who’s going to allow themselves to be dragged out looking for flowers on Cup Final day?’

  ‘That lovely lady Princess Di going so suddenly – it was flowers everywhere. We noticed the rise in demand right away. Bang! All the white flowers were gone. You could just feel it. People needed flowers. And we sold everything we had.’

  Betsy Kelly is seventy-nine years old. She has been selling flowers since 1930. A small, ambling bundle of cardigans and hats, Betsy is usually too busy to smile; she is famous at the market, as her father was before her, in the old Covent Garden of horses and carts. In all the fluorescence of the new place, Betsy is a star. A curmudgeonly one, for sure, with her waving hands, her rolling eyes, her air of being bothered by this or that nonsense. But Betsy knows her own game. She walked around our box of lilies like someone inspecting a gangrenous leg. Her lips were thinned: one could almost hear her good clock ticking, and see her thoughts, her cold ruminations on pounds, shillings and pence. For all these years, she has got up early, at four or five, and gone down the market to see what’s what. Her husband died five years ago. She looked at the lilies, lifted our bunch, scratched her hat, and bought them. She looked around when asked a question. ‘I’ve forgotten much more than you’ll ever know,’ she said.

  Kelly’s Flowers is quite far along the Commercial Road. The middle East End. A shop at the heart of Stepney. The road is filled with garment wholesalers and Indian takeaways. People trudge to the hospital. Rows of old houses sit neatly by the road. Layers of flowery wallpaper lying deep in the walls, deep in the modern emulsion. Some of the houses are being taken down. Mrs Carrington is another old lady from here. She told a story of playing as a child in some of those houses. Some of them lay less than half demolished more than half a century ago. ‘Most of them had their roofs open to the sky,’ said Mrs Carrington. ‘We fashioned tables and chairs from bricks and boards that lay around in plenty. We would unearth broken pieces of crockery that served as plates, and once, to my joy, I found the bottom half of a blue glass vase. I stood it up in the middle of my table. I filled it with the weeds that grew through the floorboards. Those houses were dark and smelly. But here we lived our pretend lives.’

  Betsy Kelly was in the back of her shop. She beetled away at her flower arrangements. One of them had a glittery message embedded in red carnations. It just said ‘Mum’. Betsy had brought our lilies back to the shop. They were soaking in buckets in her large fridge. They had spent the weekend in there. It was now five days since the lilies were picked on Sela’s farm. They were still very fresh. The heads had whitened some more, and they had softened, too. The flesh of the lily was tender now. There was the beginning of a sweet perfume.

  ‘My mum and dad had the shop,’ said Betsy, ‘and they had stalls as well. One up Petticoat Lane and one by the London Hospital. All their lives. You didn’t have staff in them days. You just came in as a girl and worked. That was the times. The stuff was different. It was nearly all English-grown. The only bit of stuff that we ever got really was from France, or Holland, but not much. It’s all the foreign stuff now.’

  Betsy has been in the present shop for thirty-two years. She and her husband took it over when old Mrs Kelly became ill. ‘We kept her,’ said Betsy. ‘She had whatsit – Alzheimer’s – and in them days the family kept them. Different kettle of fish. We never got much support. Families did it all. When I was at school, I thought I would be a gym instructor. But my mother wanted me in the shop. People were more flower-conscious then. Visiting the hospitals and that; nowadays, they’d make you laugh. It’s a wonder they go in at all. In them days, they visited the graves more. But this is us now. Do I still like flowers? Well, I suppose really, it’s a way of life, know what I mean? I don’t suppose for one minute I would like any other trade. I don’t think I would like to pack up work ’cause I think to myself, after the hectic life I’ve led, if I was to pack up work I’d just go senile, and that wouldn’t be me.’

  Most nights in the week Betsy gets home after 8 p.m. She lives in Brentwood, out in Essex. Her two sons come in and out. ‘Everything’s a cost,’ said one of them. ‘It’s a wonder anybody can make a shilling out of flowers now.’

  ‘It was special, once upon a time,’ said Betsy, ‘the old Covent Garden Market. You had the personalities. You had the people. They were florists, flower-sellers. Today, it’s all big business. Ask the old ones there now. Ask Tom. Ask Roy. Ask Ken. Any of the old ones will tell you: it was a pleasure to go to the old market. But it’s all going multinational. They’re killing the small trader. My mother stood in Whitechapel Road. My aunt beside her. Selling flowers. They worked bloody hard. You know St Clement Danes, the church, in Fleet Street? The vicar’s wife when I was a girl was Mrs Pickford. And she used to have teas for the flower girls. Just young women. Between the two wars. And once a year Mrs Pickford took all the girls to Brighton. Everything was colourful in them days. Not just th
e flowers, the people.’

  On Tuesday, 17 March, Betsy put the lilies out in the shop. Our bunch was beginning to open: some of the ends were pouting, some were puckered up. One of the ten stems was showing a white tongue. Two tongues. The leaves beneath were very green. Our bunch sat out for two days. The shop was packed on Thursday. Mother’s Day was coming up. There were men looking out of place, children shaking their little fists of pound coins. Queues all day. Betsy’s assistant, Sue, was plucking and wrapping, counting and cutting, laughing and teasing, and answering the phone.

  At 2.30 p.m. a gentleman came in. His brother Amos had died. He had been ill for a long time. ‘More merciful than tragic.’ Mr Copping wanted to leave flowers at the rest home. Sue took our bunch of lilies from the bucket. She laid them on paper, added some daisies, a few white carnations, a bit of spray. She rolled them together, and charged him £20. Mr Copping walked out into the afternoon; the shop-bell rang at his back.

  Amos Copping was dead aged sixty-nine. He had never been to Israel. The only time he was ever abroad was during his National Service. He’d spent part of a year in Hong Kong. His wife was dead, too. Mr Copping’s body lay in Tadman’s Funeral Parlour on Jubilee Street and Stepney Way. It was to this address that his brother came with the bunch of flowers. He sat a while in the chapel with Amos. The flowers were placed in a white vase. Mr Copping noticed that there was a picture of the pope in the chapel. The coffin, the pope, white lilies, and the brother. The remains of Amos Copping were buried the following Tuesday. His daughters and his brother were there. ‘More merciful than tragic,’ they said.

  After that, our flowers stayed on at Tadman’s. They were placed on a small table in the hall. The carpets there are ever so blue. Everything is scrubbed. The thing you notice is how clean it all is. Spick and span. The air smells of anything but death. ‘Everybody notices the smell,’ says Maureen Tadman. ‘It’s the flowers and the scented candles.’ The carpets look like they are hoovered on the hour. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We don’t use air fresheners or what-you-call-it, Shake’n’Vac. No. It’s the natural smell. It’s the same with the boys’ appearance. They have to look smart. Appearance is so important.’ The Tadman family has been doing funerals since 1849. The office wall is lined with old pictures of the Tadmans. Men with dark eyes and dark clothes. ‘Wag’ Tadman, the founder, in a portrait taken around the time of the Boer War; Alfred William Tadman, his son, 1882–1935, a man in a tall hat, his moustache so carefully clipped. The two boys he had: Cornelius and Alfred, 1914–96 and 1902–80, a couple of characters, upright in their portraits. All dead now, and down in the City Cemetery at Manor Park.

  Maureen Tadman was dressed in black. She wore owlish glasses. Her demeanour was somewhat melancholy, but now and then she let go of her natural reserve, and a smile lit up her face. ‘With a death,’ she said, ‘you really want to do things correctly.’ She only employs tall men. And she’s serious about their smartness. ‘How would you feel if someone was burying you covered in earrings and ponytails?’

  She is conscious of the role she has in other people’s stories. She is there at the end of many a life, neatly dressed, efficient, doing things correctly. And she sometimes wonders about those lives too: what they did, how they did it. ‘Here in the East End, marriage, birth and death mean everything to the people. They live their life a certain way. They are caring, traditional, and the tradition says that neighbours and friends will show support at the time of a death. And the number of floral tributes is evidence of that. It wouldn’t be a true East End funeral without them.’

  One of the funeral directors at Tadman’s, Jason Saddington, said you see some funny things when you’re driving a hearse. ‘You don’t see people taking off their hats any more. They just stare. And somebody might cross themselves. The younger folk just stare, and sometimes they rub their chest, like they’re embarrassed or something.’

  Mrs Tadman twisted her wedding ring around its finger. ‘I always ask the boys to treat the bodies the same as if they were their own family. We all have our dignity.’ Jason went up a ladder and washed the windows. ‘It’s a man’s world, this,’ said Mrs Tadman, ‘and you need to work that extra bit hard if you’re a woman. My own mother was buried by the firm. Aunt Ethel, too. And when it comes my turn, yes. I wouldn’t want anybody else doing mine. Every person that comes in that door is not a number; they’re people, and you must always remember that.’

  A week later, our lilies were amazing. The white petals were wide to the world. An unopened stem had softened and drooped. It looked like a green silk purse. With their yellow stamens, their moist leaves, the flowers had a powerful scent, something of old earth and the Dead Sea. Life and other business went on around them, and the lilies slowly began to wilt. The whiteness turned to brown; the petals dried and shrivelled up. The fragrance vaporised overnight. Our flowers died about three weeks after Mr Copping.

  They were placed in a bin out the back. On a windowsill there, back against the light, was a tin of air-freshener and a tub of Shake’n’Vac. Each container was covered with pictures of flowers. Live flowers under the sun. The freshness of some other day.

  Saint Marilyn

  JULY 2004

  New York – contrary to popular opinion and Frank Sinatra – is never a city that doesn’t sleep. It sleeps soundly in fact. You walk the streets on certain nights and suddenly you can feel quite alone under the buildings. It’s not that the place is deserted, there are things going on – taxi-cabs, homeless people, late-night walkers, the police – but they can seem to proceed at that hour like things out of step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin.

  I stopped one night in front of the Ferragamo shoe shop on Fifth Avenue. The light from the shop was so strong it seemed like daylight spilling over the pavement. I felt drenched in the uncanny whiteness. And there in the window, draped on transparent mannequins or laid on silver boxes, were some of the dazzling relics of the late Marilyn Monroe. ‘A pair of stilettos by Salvatore Ferragamo, scarlet satin, encrusted with matching rhinestones.’

  There’s no place like home, I thought.

  ‘Estimate: $4000–6000.’ And further along a hand-knitted cardigan, ‘with a brown geometric pattern and matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000–50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a halter-neck dress from the movie Let’s Make Love. I thought of Marilyn and Yves Montand posing for the cameras with their unhappy smiles. ‘Estimate: $15,000–20,000.’ The Monroe things had been to London, Paris and Buenos Aires, and were now back in New York for auction at Christie’s. Ferragamo took the opportunity for a cute bit of public-relations flimflam. The cold air from the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza – underneath Christie’s salerooms – seemed to be blowing in one great frosty whoop down the avenue.

  The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the altar, where a glass case stood by itself, with a casket inside, containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin died, and she died, according to a woman I spoke to at the end of the queue, ‘with a heart as big as the world itself’. The last words of St Theresa are not open to doubt. ‘I am not dying,’ she said. ‘I am entering into Life.’ She was canonised in 1925.

  I joined the line at St Patrick’s and followed it down and when it was my turn I touched the glass and walked away. Men to my side were crying and whispering. The relics of St Theresa were travelling the world too: last year Russia and Europe, this year America, from New York to Tucson, Arizona, with a spell over Christmas at the Church of St Jane Frances de Chantal in North Holl
ywood.

  The Christie’s sale of Marilyn’s relics raised $13,405,785. The Ferragamo ruby shoes were bought for $48,300 by the son of the man who made them, while Lots 51 and 40, the Santa Monica cardigan and the dress from Let’s Make Love, sold for $167,500 and $52,900 respectively. The big wow of the auction, as expected, was the Jean Louis sheath dress, covered in tiny stones, worn by Marilyn at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. This went for over a million dollars. The man who bought it (owner of a memorabilia shop called Ripley’s Believe It or Not) thought he’d got a great bargain. The Kennedy dress smashed the previous world record for the sale of a female costume: a blue velvet Victor Edelstein dress belonging to Princess Diana that sold for $222,500 in June 1997. The actor and peroxophile Tony Curtis, who must have forgotten that he once said kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler, got out of his seat at the auction to tell reporters that Marilyn would have been thrilled. ‘She’d have enjoyed the fact that people still love her so much,’ he said.

  The sale of Marilyn Monroe’s personal property – a plastic cup, a group of blankets, a plexiglas tissue-box cover, a piece of paper with the words ‘he does not love me’ written in pencil, to name just a few of the 576 lots that were auctioned – may represent the most interesting event to occur in contemporary art since the death of Andy Warhol. Indeed it takes Warhol’s deification of celebrity past its absurdly logical conclusion: why pay more for a representation of Marilyn Monroe, even an Abstract Expressionist one like De Kooning’s, or a mass-produced one like Warhol’s, when, for a not dissimilar price, you can own a little something of Marilyn herself? The Christie’s sale goes so far ahead of Warhol’s thinking that we ironically end up back where we started, with the basic principle of authenticity. The threat – the joy – was always that Pop would eat itself in the end, and it has done. The old superstition about High Art, ‘Rembrandt actually touched this canvas,’ can now be applied to the personal belongings of the century’s most famous woman – this object actually touched Marilyn – and thus our era’s tangled worries with the meaning of fine art are for a moment resolved. Pop culture became its opposite number: the ordinary minutiae of the extraordinary life came to seem as formally expressive as Guernica. The designer Tommy Hilfiger pays a fortune for two pairs of jeans Marilyn wore in The Misfits. He frames them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags.