Bowie Odyssey: 70 by Simon Goddard

Author:Simon Goddard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

MORNING BREAKS ON a new era in Haddon Hall. Yesterday it was the bohemian Xanadu of David and Angie and their friends. Today it is the Camelot of Lord and Lady Bowie and their chosen attendants. The transformation is immediate.

With marriage comes money – a cheque for a thousand dollars sent from Col Barnett, Angie’s father in Cyprus – and with money comes materialism. Lady Bowie invests her dowry in furnishing their palace and educating her lord on the art of interior design. Angie introduces his fingertips to the tactile delights of London’s dockside warehouses where her Persian-rugged Cypriot upbringing is put to use selecting exotic utilitarian carpets to cover Haddon Hall’s bare wooden floors. Closer to home, The Stable Door antique shop and auction house off Beckenham High Street lures them with a monstrous marble-topped Burmese sideboard adorned with dragons which they repaint white. It is accompanied by a French hand-carved four-poster bed, bought in pieces which they assemble with the zeal of two cats building a bird table. New colour is introduced in the living room, repainted an aristocratic dark olive green, and the curtains dyed a juicy red. And everywhere, every day, or so it seems to those under the same moulded ceilings, another new objet d’art appears. A peacock-tail fan. Tiffany glassware. Chinese silk. A Japanese desk. A Gamet art deco vase.

Piece by piece, they are constructing a stage set for a drama yet to be written. They make it together, but it is Angie who intuitively directs the action. Hers are the eyes of a Hollywood soundstage and David its star talent. She alone knows best how to light him and what angles to shoot from: create for him this world in private so that he can go forth and conquer the one beyond in public. This is her plan. Invent from the inside, from the bare floorboards up. Prepare, scheme and dress-rehearse then activate, execute and win. Cocoon in fantasy, then emerge and make an epic of reality.

But the daily pace of Haddon Hall can’t wholly surrender to fantasy just yet. There is still food to be bought and bills to be paid. There is still laundry to do in the twin-tub washing machine and spin dryer, both on tick from the London Electricity Board, their rattling metal carbuncles spoiling the antiquity of the hallway. And there are still five other bodies sharing their oxygen. For now.

SATURDAY IN SOHO. Its cross streets bustling with weekenders, out-oftowners, in-crowders and knocking-shoppers seeking beer or espresso or dim lights or loud music or fab gear or foreign food or mucky pictures or cheap flesh or whatever else it is they imagine they’ll find here if they lurk and gawp long enough at the neon, the windows, the girls, the boys, the beaded doorways and the pandemonium of XXXs. The scent of urgency, of a thousand cigarettes half-smoked in haste, of fast-frying meat, of heavy perfumes and lacquers buzzing in one giant swarm of man bait, of the exhaust fumes of beeping cars, of steamed milk and spilt ale and hot sugar.

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