Reinhold LOTE

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-913090-31-9
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

Reihe: Twenty in 2020

WINNER of the James Tait Black Prize 2021 and The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021. As seen in Document Journal,Guardian and The White Review Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the 'Bright Young Things' of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda's journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a writer and artist born and based in Glasgow. Published in the Cambridge Literary Review and The Stockholm Review, Shola was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and has won a Dewar Award for Literature. LOTE is her debut novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reinhold, Shola von

Leseproben

I

A n incensed blond twink said, “Excuse me, miss! Where do you think you’re going? This is a members-only club.”

Knowing:

i. People rarely allow for Blackness and caprice (be it in dress or deportment) to coexist without the designation of Madness.

ii. People like to presume Madness over style whenever they have the chance

I gathered that my eBay lab diamonds, silver leatherette and lead velvets had been mentally catalogued as a few of the traditional accoutrements of the Maniacal Black Person, who possesses no taste, only variations of a madness which comes down on her from on high.

He occupied a large built-in table of the kind at which a receptionist or concierge would customarily be stationed.

“I thought this was the new archive site? I’m volunteering.”

He was more annoyed than embarrassed at being caught out.

“Oh,” he said, smiling at a sheet of paper. “I’ve only been informed of two volunteers. You don’t seem to be down?”

“Mathilda Adamarola.”

“I see: ‘. Well, I wasn’t given surnames, I was just told ‘Agnes and Mathilda’. You’re downstairs,” he looked at the name and then at my face as if I’d performed a conjuration.

On the first step down I paused,

“Why were you just pretending to be on the reception of a members’ club?”

He ignored me.

Downstairs, I saw the new site had at least once been a kind of Learned Society or specialist members’ library, still replete with its blackish wood panelling and Lincrusta. The actual library was situated in the basement but there were no books lingering on the shelves to indicate specialism.

“Hate it,” was the first thing Elizabeth/Joan said to me. And when I asked her what it had been specifically: “Oh, I don’t know. Horrid Old Gents’ Club, or something. Who cares. Anyway, it’s all ours for the next couple of weeks until the rest of the department move over.”

“Who was that on the door?”

“G yes, James.”

I told her about his bizarre little roleplay.

“Probably his undying power fantasy to be front of house at a members-only club—people nurse all sorts of passions and they’ll live them out whenever they have the chance.”

I had befriended Elizabeth/Joan a month ago. I’d been going almost daily to the National Portrait Gallery Archive for some time to look at photographs of Stephen Tennant and some of my other Transfixions. My interactions with her up until then had been minimal. She was rude in an absent-minded sort of way and irritated me in her ostensible membership of a subset of a type I had once become familiar with. All week I would notice, upon looking up mid-reverie from my desk, that someone was watching me from across the room. It was the kind of shameless gaze that suggests the gazer has forgotten you can see them back. One day near the end of that week, as I was leaving, she asked me what I was researching. Her eyes glazed instantaneously when I started speaking and I saw she was, of course, seeking an opportunity to talk about herself so I indulged her by asking what it was like working at the archive. Here she launched into a monologue: she was extremely bored here, she was experiencing some kind of malaise, in fact. Hated the actual cataloguing side so had asked to be put on the readers’ room welcome desk with the hope of some kind of interaction. “But everyone that comes here...” and her eyes fell on the only other reader, an admittedly tedious looking man. “Nobody ever speaks to me; it’s actually kind of cruel if you think about it.” She looked at me once more as if really taking me in and asked again what I was researching, then where I lived, where I had studied, and so on. I fed her a mixture of facts and lies which sated her enough for her to launch into gossip about every member of staff in the archives, none of whom I knew, and then what gossip she had gleaned from some of the regular visitors. “Churchill...” she sighed a sigh of true exasperation, nodding towards the man across who was definitely eavesdropping by this point.

Then she moved onto personal life, proving my estimation not far off: private day school, “then undergrad at Edinburgh. New Sloane rather than Sloane or Old Sloane because parents are old-old middle class but new to London. Neo Art Sloane, I suppose. Nobody uses the term ‘Sloane’ anymore, but I do, because that’s what I am.”

She was the perfect candidate for a new Escape. Would provide a new microcosm to slip into. My brain was already working out how best to go about it, but as she went on, I detected a weird grain in the mix: it was an act, an excellent one. She was not of that class or type; this excited me.

Sadly, a few days into our acquaintance, I realised she was not acting at all. The grain was something else. Something that would not properly surface, I predicted, until another couple of decades, at which point she would undergo an epiphany like an E.M. Forster character abroad, and revolt against the faintly alternative, ultimately conventional existence in which she’d entangled herself. (An event symbolised by the languid but vengeful flinging out the window onto the rocks below of a white clay bowl full of dandelion salad from a villa in wherever it was in two decades from now that had become the inevitable zone for mildly artistic wealthy English people. The bowl would not be dashed, however, but caught by the incoming tide, before being swallowed.)

I was sure she’d told me her name during her monologue, but I did not take it in. Later I looked up the staff. There were three cataloguing assistants. A James, whom she’d just identified as the evil blond man upstairs, an Elizabeth, and a Joan. I had never been able to ascertain whether she was Elizabeth or Joan and it had now been too long to ask.

It was Elizabeth/Joan who phoned me one day at about two in the morning—“We’ve just received a tonne of photos, or something.” I only took a moment to realise who it was. “Full of stuff you’re interested in. Who was that one? Yes, Stephen Tennant and all that lot, stuff from the ’20s-’30setcetera. I mean an actual tonne in weight of photos, or something. Desperately need people to help sort through it. Especially if they can recognise any of the sitters. Unseen images. Good for your biography. I’ll text you the details.” And then a pause: the unfamiliar process of awaiting a reply.

She must have looked me up on the database and taken my number down for later use. I wasn’t sure how authorised she was to appoint unofficial volunteers for the archive at two in the morning. I was also acutely aware of the fact that I would be doing the bulk of her assigned job for her without pay. She did, however, arrange for travel and lunch expenses which came to about fifty pounds a week, a significant amount for someone recently sanctioned.

The photographs were an unsolicited donation.

“Some shitbag’s always leaving behind paintings and photos in their will, so we’ve got a constant flow coming in all the time. They think they’re doing us a favour and they also imagine it’s going to be hung in the main gallery next to Queen Elizabeth the First. Actually, we’ve got a strict donations and acquisitions policy. We can’t accept ninety-five percent of the dross we get; don’t know how that explains the dross we keep. Has to be significant to portraiture in some way. Someone famous or influential or, even rarer, ‘something significant to the history of portraiture itself.’ Not just some old shitbag’s memory box we didn’t ask for.” So I was informed by Elizabeth/Joan on the first morning of volunteering.

In this case, a relative had carried out instructions on behalf of their shitbag great uncle or aunt and sent everything at once in cardboard boxes. Fortunately, following instructions of the deceased, a list of some of the figures of significance was also sent, even if none of the thick fabric-bound albums or loose photographs were named and dated. I soon discovered that they had not “just received” this donation, which had come about ten years prior, but rather had just gotten around to looking at it.

There were generally no more than three of us to sort through the images at a time. Usually two since Elizabeth/ Joan hated nothing more. The other volunteer was a woman in her early ’80s called Agnes, who wore pink pearls and tartan every day, and got as much pleasure from the whole thing as I did. She had been some kind of historian and it was not lost on me that we were the only two Black people working for the archives, and that we were working for free. I wasn’t sure where Elizabeth/Joan had poached her from—perhaps she was another archive user like me, wrangled into free labour, or perhaps one of the official volunteers pilfered from the database. Every so often Agnes, otherwise hardnosed, would hold out a photo and operatically exclaim,

“Now at this, you’ve to see this, you have got to see this,” and I would have to stop and come around to look. They were always intriguing pictures. Twice some quite scandalous ones that I would have been too embarrassed to show her. The group shot of skiers laughing in the snow would bring about the same delighted arpeggio as the lakeside tableau of erect...