Dialogue: Portraits of glumness, from pub to mansion

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Two unexceptional men - one young, one in early middle-age - were sitting sideways up at the bar in a pub in Rye, facing each other and able to include in their conversation an older man at a table a couple of metres away. It was daytime, so for once there was no football on the television to obliterate talk.

The young man was going on about an electrician who'd been to his house. "Honest-to-God, by the time 'e'd finished with the switchboard when I turned me cooker on me next-door-neighbour's garage door opened.

"When I turn the board off to go on 'oliday, the lights of bloody London Town'll go out, an' the drawbridge at Windsor Castle'll keep goin' up an' down till I get back."

"Dunno how they teach these lads 'cause they know nothing," said the middle-aged man, and they both looked at the old geezer, wondering why he hadn't chimed in.

And then he did. "That's the trouble, they just teach 'em but they 'aven't got experience.

"They used to have expe-e-erience. Expe-e-rience," he repeated, almost singing the middle syllable in a tone redolent of Alf Garnett.

"They used to call it apprenticeships. Lads spent five or seven years working under a tradesman. Training, they called it. But then politicians knew better than wot had gone on for centuries and sent all the little electrician darlings to school for a couple of years, an' said 'Go play with the live wires, you clever little buggers, you'."

He saw me taking notes and when he stopped I looked up, stumbled into eye contact, and he said, "Wotcha think of Blair, then?"

"Pass," I said, smiling.

"That's wot he said," speaking to the others but nodding at me, "when God asked if he wanted any brains - Pass'." I laughed too.

He was elderly and wearing what had been an expensive grey herringbone jacket that had lost its shape from heavy objects carried in the side-pockets, and the sleeves were concertinaed.

His trousers were quality serge way past their best and his sturdy but fashionable shoes fairly new. He looked like a man who wasn't short of money but had too many pressing engagements at the pub to find time to spend it.

The two men at the bar lapsed into conversation again and the older man suspended his interest in the world and stared at the table, as lone pub habituaacés tend to do, before suddenly looking at the others and saying: "It's like anything, you have to have training and practice. You're an athlete or you're a financier an' you have to have experie-e-e-ence.

"Like me. Forty years I been boozing. When I started, a couple of pints and I was useless. Now I can booze through an afternoon an' I'm as sharp as a tack.

"Which reminds me," he said getting up, mocking the world with his despair as he walked to the bar, "I better have another one to keep in shape, an' before the price goes up."

That was last weekend. Next, I drove from Rye to Charleston Farm in Sussex - it's such a small country, England - the home of painters Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, their various ambisextrous lovers and friends and the resulting, mixed families. Charleston was the country resort for the Bloomsbury set. It's been restored at the cost of £1 million.

I was excited in anticipation because so many people I unconditionally admire were associated with the group, especially the incomparably brilliant writers Virginia Woolfe (Vanessa Bell's sister), E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot and the lesser but significantly talented economist J. Maynard Keynes and biographer Lytton Strachey. And I recalled a small paperback called Civilisation by Clive Bell that I read in my formative years, and which stamped its values on my mind. Bell was Vanessa's first husband.

Either Vanessa or Duncan painted almost every surface within the house, on the walls and on the furniture, in pale, pastel tones. As we moved through the rooms, the effect was osmotic and powerful. A guide obliquely told of the atmosphere of free love across the sexes that was a rebellion against the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.

Then, as she began to pepper her commentary with "as you will know," and "of course," I noticed that the pictures hanging in each room were almost all of one another - lovers and family members.

The subjects of the portraits seemed utterly sure of themselves but they were glum.

I began to absorb a sense of the introversion, of insufferable complacency and self-importance of those who lived there. Were they happy? Maybe, but there's no sense of joy in the place. Maybe, like lunch, there's no such thing as a free love.