Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (31 page)

Kingston-upon-Thames is a pivotal place. I investigate the baroque reef of Bentalls, Ballard’s favoured shopping centre; he drove there from Shepperton to make his Christmas purchases. The experience informed his final novel, the messianic
Kingdom Come.
‘The suburbs dream of violence,’ he wrote. ‘Sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.’ Bentalls has been here for ever; its ‘benevolent’ domination of a busy through-route seems as long-established as All Saints Church, with its fire-blackened union flag, ironclad memorials, and crowning ceremonies for ancient English monarchs. Kings married rivers: to command them, to control bridges – and to contemplate, like Ballard, the violence of love. Battle wounds heal in the marmoreal embrace of shadowy, incense-filled interiors and in the aisles of shopping centres illuminated by racks of glittering trade goods. A hundred mute flat-screen televisions are playing the same image: black smoke over an industrial wasteland. Plane crash? Oil fire? News report or CGI fiction?

I had been invited, once before, to a rendezvous at Bentalls. They were making a
South Bank Show
profile of Ballard. He had said generous things about
London Orbital
and it was thought that I might be a suitable talking head for a soundbite on shopping malls. Television is about phone calls from researchers who want you to do the research for them. About repeat calls and last-minute cancellations. Cash-in-hand promises dissolving into paperwork.

Ballard was unwell, they said. He couldn’t travel. The mall piece would be done without him: in Bluewater, in a Kentish chalk quarry he had never visited. Jokingly, at the end of another film, he gave me my instructions. He thought he was playing the voice on the tape from
Charlie’s Angels.
I saw him as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Everything was turning into Denmark. ‘Iain, I’ve just passed the baton on to you. I want you to blow up the Bentall Centre and Bluewater. Your assignment is to destroy the M25.’

It appeared, from the multiple screens in the John Lewis complex, that somebody had beaten me to it; thick black plumes over a six-lane motorway. I made a quick sweep of the Kingston charity shops and now I wanted a cup of coffee. Picture windows stare across the Thames at a new red-brick estate, with pleasure boats parked right outside.

The self-service cafeteria was deserted. A young woman in a blue overall, red-gold hair tied back, attractive patina of freckles, stood behind me, cloth in hand, waiting. The table gleamed: no smear, no telltale rings. My orange juice was untouched. A Swedish fork lay across sturdy granules of scrambled egg. She didn’t budge, she wanted something.

‘Why is it, do you think, the best film critics are deaf?’

She had clocked my book. I found a tattered and taped copy of
Nouvelle Vague: The First Decade
by Raymond Durgnat in one of the charity pits. For half the price of my coffee. She was quite correct. I met two of the best of the breed, Durgnat himself and Manny Farber. I sat down with them for meals in noisy restaurants. And regretted an opportunity missed as both men struggled to pick up sound. Cinema was posthumous; Farber was painting in San Diego and Durgnat was being rediscovered when it was too late. That slight deafness distances the nuisance of the world and confers an aura of withheld wisdom, a disdainful but not cynical intelligence. They read the image with such clarity, made the sharpest connections, imposing their own subtitles. They knew that film was not all there is.

The waitress was a student at a local facility known as The Centre for Suburban Studies. Nobody was required to go anywhere; to walk, roam, or drive to fungal villages growing out into the flatlands around Cambridge. ‘We do it all online,’ she said. ‘Satellite mappings. Google Earth.’

She sat down, opposite me, there were no supervisors in sight; she reached for my book.
Des Femmes Disparaissent.
An emotive still: a thin dark man with a gun standing behind a blonde woman (not unlike Janet Leigh). She has hands (which do not look like her own) clenched over her mouth. ‘All French gangster films,’ Durgnat glosses, ‘are unconscious parables for the political scene.’ The man is North African. The woman’s shoulder straps are white.

‘You’ve taken his chair. This character I knew.’

She drained my coffee, rim of froth over a downy moustache.

‘He came here, between lectures, for a coffee and a croissant. To work on his book. He said there was no appreciable difference between libraries and cafés. Students only turned up at his classes to eat. They sat in ranks munching burgers as he read from Marc Augé’s meditation on non-places. While they licked their fingers and texted.’

The creased academic, with his ponytail and black leather jacket, told her that he spent most of his life at the wheel. Two days in Kingston, one in Loughborough. He lived in Brighton. The kids were with the second wife in Liverpool. It was difficult to know if he was in a service station or a new university. Campuses were the garden cities of the motorway, more bars, banks, health centres than any failing county town. Lectures were like extra features on a DVD of travel.

He no longer wrote, he stared at the river. He asked for his coffee black and thought about taking up smoking again. One day he left the folder behind: nothing but unattributed quotations. ‘Death ceases to be a definite boundary.’ ‘Place becomes a refuge to the habitué of non-places.’ ‘The film made him feel like someone watching a film.’ She kept the John Lewis carrier bag. The man in the leather jacket never came back.

Molesey congratulates its Olympic oarsmen: Andy Triggs-Hodge, Tom Jones, Acer Nethercott, Steve Rowbotham. There is a tablet in memory of the ‘world’s first ever manned balloon flight’ by James Sadler in 1785. Green parakeets squawk in innocent apple trees.

Light rain was misting my spectacles by the time I reached the outskirts of Shepperton. The river path was blocked by a large two-tone Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident twenty-first-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. I record a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823–1866. Modernist white cubes with picture windows animated by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for liquidity in a time of recession.

Before I search out somewhere to sleep, I head for the station. That’s where Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with
Empire of the Sun
, he didn’t relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-edged properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the
where
of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast.
Times
crossword. Desk overlooking a natural garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with
World at One
on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation:
The Rockford Files
rather than Kenneth Clark.

The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerized by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how
The Drowned World
was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature installation; a stage-set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots. A refuge and the generator of some of the most potent myths of our time: one of those myths being Ballard himself, the safe house, the good father.

Ballard may be the first serious novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libraries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than H. G. Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.

Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Students who have lost the habit of literature recognize, in the Shepperton master’s forensic prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, ‘What I Believe’, deploys Ballard’s favourite device, the list: as he curates a museum of affinities.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Dürer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

It was almost dark when I got there, after a street occupied by Indian restaurants, Chinese takeaways, charity and novelty shops. Scenographic maps known as ‘Road Rugs’ were on special offer at £22.95. Petrol pumps and service stations on which to wipe your muddy feet. A close-cropped man, hedge-hopping Old Charlton Road, spotted me as I lined up the shot.

‘A writer bloke lives in that house. We’ve been out here twenty-five years. I’ve never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he’s been on the box.’

The silver Ford Granada is tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin cruiser, in the vestigial driveway. The privet hedge has been trimmed, the napkin of lawn made tidy. The Crittall window of the front room is overwhelmed by the sinister fecundity of a yucca. There is a cheerful yellow door with an inset panel of dark glass. The rear elevation is gritty with pebbledash. Perched on the wooden fence is a cut-out Sylvester, the Loony Tunes cat, waiting to pounce.

It is easy to understand how Ballard, after he lost his driving licence in the 1970s, found everything he required within an hour’s walk, in any direction, out from this house. The ford where Martian invaders from
The War of the Worlds
crossed the river. Film studios. Reservoirs. Airport perimeter roads. And the footpaths, playgrounds, woods and streams he never felt the need to describe. Territory in which his three children grew up and thrived. That is the particular magic of his final book,
Miracles of Life
: how, through minimal changes of emphasis, he revises his mythology to give readers the illusion of being guided, at last, close to the heart of the mystery. A mystery which is somehow incarnate in the hidden spaces of the bereaved Shepperton property.

Even now, when Ballard was removed to the care and comfort of his friend and partner, Claire Walsh, in Shepherd’s Bush, the house seemed possessed by a form of illumination not on stream to the rest of Old Charlton Road: the afterglow of decades of scrupulous composition. The physical effects we impose, in default of sentiment, to compensate for the writer’s troubling absence. Fay, Ballard’s elder daughter, told me that in her childhood the house did indeed stand out from its shrouded neighbours.

‘When I was young the lights used to be on the whole time, even on bright summer days. Daddy loved the idea of brightness, intensity, as if we were living in the Med.’

In too much pain to take the wheel, Ballard returned to the old house with Fay. It was strange now, this installation her father had created from the objects of his private obsessions: Ed Ruscha postcards, Paolozzi silk-screen prints, a lurid corduroy sofa. A domesticated Kurt Schwitters assemblage, in which the writer could actually live and work. Producing the books his daughters did not read.

‘I hadn’t visited Shepperton for many years, until the summer of 2008, when Daddy was quite ill,’ Fay said. ‘I remembered a dried-up orange sitting on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I walked through the door and it was still there. I said, “Oh my goodness, you still have the orange.” He looked at me and he said, very quietly, but seriously, “It’s a lemon.” It must have been there for at least forty years. I don’t see the lemon as something eccentric. It’s not a relic. It’s covered in dust. It hasn’t been moved. It’s obviously important to him. And it’s very beautiful.’

The front room, guarded by the spiky fronds of the yucca, was known, in an echo of colonial times, as the nursery. Fay presented Ballard with the plant, his Triffid-like co-tenant, in 1976; a Christmas present from Marks & Spencer. It was repotted several times and addicted to regular hits of Baby Bio. Fay reckoned that, influenced by the Ballard story ‘Prima Belladonna’, the yucca learnt to sway and sing. The nursery was the family television room, where supper was taken. An unused exercise bike, now a junk sculpture, faced the substantial set.

Chris Petit, who did make it out here, with a film crew, told me that he felt Ballard was comfortable in this constricted space because it reminded him of the internment camp, in the way that his parents’ Shanghai villa was a translation of Weybridge. Unseen horrors beyond the immaculate lawns and protective screen of trees.

When international royalties and film rights rolled in, Ballard, modest and circumspect with consumer durables, commissioned copies of two Delvaux paintings destroyed in the Second World War. Brigid Marlin, who undertook this project, wanted to paint a Ballard portrait. He agreed, visiting the artist in her studio in Hemel Hempstead, and inviting her, in return, to recreate the lost works. One of which,
The Violation
, was placed in his study. Fay remembered how her father loved feeling ‘as if he could walk into the painting and be part of the landscape with these beautiful women’. The propped-up Delvaux stood like a permanently occupied mirror to the left of the author’s desk; with a long window, looking over the undisturbed garden, to the right.