Ahead of the clock, time was running way ahead of the clock. Veronica Swan picked up the box of matches in the station waiting room, a small, familiar weight in her now ungloved hand. With the deliberate slowness she cultivated, a gesture honed over years of framing the cinematic moment, she nudged open the tray with her ring finger. A brief, bright tableau welcomed her fathoming gaze: the clustered match heads, each a tiny jewel of potential combustion, a phosphorus promise, the imminence of spark, the moment before the moments explodes. That was how she would start her Still Life. The selected single matchstick held upright resembled the radio transmitter mast. In her notebook she scrawled at speed.
Still Life opening… From darkness… The match head explodes and approaches the camera to light the cigarette, we only see the tip welcome the flame inside the frame which begins to smoke, we, the viewer, have a concrete viewpoint which settles on the eye of the vehicle’s occupant facing the direction already travelled, the road away from the grey Cold War Radio Transmission Station. The matchstick is held against the dark sky, a flash of sheet lightning illuminates a tall radio mast aligned with the matchstick. The moment has exploded.
We are in two places at once, inside the snow globe looking out and outside looking in. Welcome to somewhere else, welcome to the world of Veronica Swan…
Veronica Swan placed the box of matches on the polished surface of the waiting room table, each adorned with a single rose, a still life in a glass vase. A silent choreography of objects, the clock’s quiet tick a counterpoint to the roses’ slow surrender to the inevitable fade.
Fade and cut. The images lingered, ghosts of her recent film. Inevitably, the post-screening interrogations would circle back to them, demanding connection, a neat stitching together of Q and A, A1 to A2. A chain of signification leading, perhaps, like that coded message from the radio mast twenty miles north of London to her modernist Theseus. Ariadne’s thread, conspicuously absent from the de Chirico canvases she’d absorbed on her last European sojourn, a journey through a version of Europe which only existed inside her artistic vision. It was the painted train smoke in those stark, unsettling scenes that possessed the long finish, a lingering resonance like the Italian wine at the provincial film festival, a fragrant gift that seemed to drag a fragment of her back as the train pulled out of the painted vision below a large tower, a return dream ticket which returned her to here ready to depart once more, to begin again with the blank canvas, dipping the ink in the well, drawing her still life from the weight of the waiting room.
Found part of herself. The phrase, unmoored on a separate page, floated like a stray thought between the ruled lines of her notebook. Countdown again. The match heads, tiny sentinels promising the solace of a future cigarette, a fleeting echo of Anna on that Belgian train in Akerman’s film.
Here, in this waiting room, she was again tracing the phantom smoke of de Chirico’s miniature train, a piece torn from the Ariadne series postcard now juxtaposed with a decisive red line in her notebook. The ancient and the modern, entwined. The ship of Theseus, reimagined as a train. How to represent the colour of the sail in this new iteration? Her own Theseus, perhaps, would resonate with Socrates, imprisoned, his fate suspended, hanging on the distant return of that mythic vessel, the end of the festival heralding the pending fate of the hemlock’s bitter kiss. Where had she seen that cassette? The pending fate, hand drawn, inside a silver cigarette box, a triangle nestled within a square – Plato’s forms, no doubt the pretentious insignia (from the Latin “land of the Sicani”, a tribe Pliny described as living in Latium. Did the cassette cover allude to the tribe wandering below the pylons? Didn’t Tarkovsky hand it to her in that cafe below the hill? Something to do with John Regan?) on the cover of some long-forgotten band aspiring to soundtrack glory. Years ago, yet the enigmatic design had somehow lodged itself in her memory. It would now be a box inside a box inside a storage container at Elstree.
The ship’s sail became the smoking train in the painting. How would she represent the departing Theseus? The silver cassette box, she now recalled with a sharper clarity, had featured a Kandinsky triangle held within a Rothko square, a visual collision that had somehow evoked the black cube of Saturn swallowing that lonely Newtown church perched above the Barnet bypass nine miles north of Elstree Studios, at the top of WILLOW WAY, it held the surroundings in its sway, the dark triangle looming over the film location. There was a photograph of it in the transport cafe at the bottom of the hill where she met Tarkovsky, she needed to bring him something concrete today. They must explore the modernist ship’s sail, misaligned, a photograph of it tucked away in the Isokon archive. Her gaze drifted to her hand, then to the matchbox, the swan was beautiful, it matched her cape. A flicker of uncertainty – dream or waking? She reached for another matchstick inside the box. Veronica harboured a deep-seated aversion to the simplistic binary of white as good, black as evil. Too many murky undercurrents, explored and dissected in previous works. She’d always gravitated towards the weight and form of Cézanne, rather than the ephemeral light of the Impressionists, though Varda’s Le Bonheur remained an acknowledged touchstone. Her updated Phaeton would, inevitably, lean towards the allure of dark matter. For her, white was the stark expanse of a snow-covered landscape seen from a train window, but it was that single, dark scar beneath the pylons, where the flaming chariot had clipped the earth, that held the true focus in her location test shots. White was the canvas, the blank page, absence itself. Saturnian black, the colour of her beloved coffee, offered a perverse kind of endless hope, like that bottomless pond Tarkovsky had shown her near the sinister swallow holes by the A1, a dark mirror into which one could cast thoughts and watch them swim. The black swan on the matchbox would be her Theseus sail. A small, potent detail upon which the next narrative could pivot, an echo of truth to anchor the day. The secret sign of the spy, the lover, the architect of symbols. The day would lead her to another assignation in Hatfield, with Tarkovsky, her Russian dreamboat (a title he batted away with a hand gesture stolen from the MosFilm Hamlet, which he often reminded the cafe regulars, was based on Pasternak’s translation), the only one who could navigate the treacherous sea between her inner vision and the silver screen, her visual translator, who had recounted how the local chalk stream ran unnaturally red with dye from the Lone Star factor, which they then used in that children’s film, a crimson flow descending the escarpment to feed the river in Borehamwood, a river that had run thick with stage blood during the filming of The Shining. Together, they were to scout locations further up the road from Elstree, on the hill opposite that stark modernist church. The hill where the moment had exploded, not once, but twice, sending phantom flames into the silhouette of the triangle atop the Hilltop, a name that resonated with Plato’s shadowy cave, giving the illusion of movement in Shadowflame, a film title she would underline years later, returning to the triangle doodle in this very notebook on exhibit in Turin next to the de Chirico painting of Ariadne and the Theseus train. Let’s rewind to here. Ahead of the clock. The station announcement drowned by the hiss of the milk steamer as a train pulled away, rumbling under the table supporting the notebook, still full of fresh snowfields waiting for the footprints of her Theseus.
A classic tale, the signal, the code, the white sail or the black. Theseus, Isolde, a common thread woven through the ages, a fundamental narrative vision. Theseus, the white sail a promise of victory over the Minotaur, a successful navigation of the labyrinthine thread. A promise to his waiting father, the black sail a harbinger of tragedy. Aegeus, unable to bear the suspense, casting himself into the sea upon sighting the dark cloth, the waters forever bearing his name. Or perhaps Isolde’s lie about the flags, the tragic cascade of consequences. Colour, surface, viewer, the film across the eye of the beholder…
Veronica Swan lifted her gaze from the dense weave of her notebook, watching the waitress navigate the space between tables, gliding towards her with an almost spectral grace.
“Excuse me. Are you Veronica Swan?”
“Yes,” Swan replied in her public speaking tone. “Has someone left a message for me? A perfumed postcard, perhaps?”
“No,” the waitress said, looking at the postcards on the wall behind Veronica Swan. “I wondered if you are writing a new script in that notebook.”
“And you thought you might waltz into the story, did you?” Swan said, half teasing, a habit she employed when she wished to accelerate a tiresome audition.
“I saw you in here yesterday but I didn’t want to disturb you,” the waitress added with a slight barb to her tone.
“And yet today…” Swan countered, noting the tone.
“I’m sorry,” the waitress inhaled, allowing herself a standing count, “it’s just that I saw you with the de Chirico postcard ripped in two and I thought that must be from the next film.”
“It might well be. Anyway is there something I can do for you?” Swan said, pursing the lips around the final vowel sound, exhaling an imaginary smoke ring with which she might veil this intrusion.
“All the time you were here yesterday I was doodling on a napkin.” The words of the waitress were accompanied by a musical silent movie mime.
“Can I see it? Was it folded into a black triangle?” Swan asked, shifting her seated angle of attack.
“I threw it in the bin,” came the throwaway repost.
“Was it a detailed sketch of Ariadne working in the coffee kiosk attached to a station waiting room?” Swan enquired.
“Not quite. After you left yesterday’s table I felt a coldness down the platform and…” the waitress held her breath, allowing space for Swan to interject.
“I do tend to have that affect on places. ‘The Queen of doom cinema’ should be embroidered on my Mary Queen of Scots cape. Two decades over my shoulder and yet it haunts every future step. Can you believe that was 1973?”
“The Tower of Tears? I love that film. I’ve seen it a thousand times,” the waitress said, smiling for the first time.
“I doubt it,” Swan snorted, “but it’s kind of you to exaggerate. I hope you allocate hours to other films too.”
“You wanted to adapt Oreo in 1974, didn’t you? What happened to that script?”
A gust of wind came in from the platform and lifted Swan’s notebook.
“How did you know about that?” Swan said, slamming her hand down on the table to ground her words. “Yes, they said it would be impossible to transfer Fran Ross to celluloid, but it was they who made it impossible, burying it under a weight of indifference. That was why I eventually formed my own company. Anyway, you were saying that there was an icy chill in the air.” Swan said, with a flourish of her cape.
“It was the scent,” said the waitress within a deep inhalation, as if uncorking the previous day, “the scent lingered where you had been sitting. I wanted to ask you about your perfume.”
“Oh that. It’s called Still Life. I had it commissioned for the next film. If you leave your contact details, I’ll send you an invite to the premiere, whenever that may happen, we haven’t even set sail yet. I do know that it will be a scented screening in AromaVision. You’ll be able to take a sample of Still Life away with you,” Swan added, with a subtle hint that the bell was about to ring on their conversation.
“That’s amazing. I hope you don’t mind, but I picked up a piece of one of the torn postcards as a souvenir, I think it was Still Life with Plaster Cupid.” The waitress looked at the seated figure before adding, “I can give you it back if you need it, do you already have the story finished?”
“Almost,” came the seated reply. “I had one stumbling block but I felt close to solving it here yesterday.”
“I thought so,” the waitress said, looking to see if her presence was required elsewhere. “I could see you looking at the trains and the figures passing, and the clock ticking, sketching triangle patterns, drawing lines between pylons and shapes that I assume represent the movement of certain characters. You were lost in your own cinematic universe, drawing constellations and plotting the position of the stars, I felt like an unseen planet orbiting your table. It was like I was watching you in your next film. I even looked for a hidden camera.”
“I am in the next film. Not something I set out to do, but the film might be called Veronica Swan’s Still Life.”
“And are you going to wear the cape?”
“I’m going to dress exactly as I am dressed now. And who knows, a waitress, that looks not unlike you, might well walk up to the table. What would you have her do next?” Swan asked, in a more gentle tone.
“She wouldn’t do anything,” smiled the waitress.
“She wouldn’t?” Swan shrugged.
“She has already done it,” came the reply, the waitress standing tall now.
“Has she indeed!” Swan laughed. “And when exactly did she do it? I assume it was yesterday as my caped figure walked down the platform into the smoke of a freshly lit cigarette. Once I was out of sight she sat at this table and inhaled the lingering scent of Still Life. What did our waitress do next?” Swan said, opening her notebook and folding the page.
“She took the match head from the ash tray and started to colour in the swan on the box,” said the waitress, once again taking to her silent film role with an animated confidence. “I finished colouring it in with the ashes of the lightning tree”
“The lightning tree?” Swan said slowly, chewing the words.
“When we were kids a flaming branch broke off in a storm. Each of us who saw it kept a bit of the lightning tree. If you hold a match to it for more than three seconds it sparks,” the waitress added, looking at the clock, a fire in her eyes.
“I see. It was you who placed the matchbox on the table?” Swan replied, puzzled by something beyond the open door. Perhaps waiting on the next gust of wind.
“Not just any matchbox,” said the waitress, desperate to recapture Swan’s attention, “it is possible that some splinters from the lightning tree accidentally fell in there, that thing could explode any minute.”
“You’re a bit of a firecracker aren’t you. I was coming through this station six years ago when the fire started below us, were you working here then?”
“No. I was ahead of the clock.”
“You set all this up for my benefit, gambling that I’d sit here at this time, ahead of the clock.”
“Ahead of the clock”, the waitress said, pointing upwards, “and ahead of the clock, just like your film. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh. AHEAD OF THE CLOCK! You know I was just thinking of that red stream, the odd coloured patterns moving through the water. Isn’t that odd?” Swan pondered, “I hardly ever think of that time. It was an unpolished gem glinting in the bed of the river, did you see that at Saturday morning cinema? You know my back catalogue better than I do. That was just a curiosity, a simple supernatural tale for the Children’s Film Foundation, it was the era after The Owl Service and that Powell and Pressburger film. What was it called?”
“The Boy Who Turned Yellow.”
“That was it. I never thought I’d ever talk about Ahead of the Clock again, having said that, it does sometimes come up in Q and A sessions before the interviewer usually moves on to the current release being screened. A shame really, I do have a fondness for that rough cut diamond, that little children’s film ended up more like an episode of Doomwatch in my hands of course, polluted streams, nuclear threats and the like.”
“It wasn’t so little to us.” A tone of sadness entered the voice of the waitress. “It meant the world. It offered us a glimpse into that snow globe world in the film. Was that the first time you used the snow globe illusion?”
“Perhaps,” Swan said, slowing her thoughts once more. “It was a touch of magic and I’ll be using it again. Speaking of magic, how did you know I’d sit here? Somebody else could have taken the matches.”
“You sat here yesterday. Odds were you’d chose the same table. No big mystery. I coloured in the swan. A Veronica Swan matchbox should have a black swan.”
“You are a very intricate being after all. Would you like to be in the film and play yourself?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“And I know that inside the box of matches is a phone number.”
“It’s like you’ve already written this scene. Would you like another coffee?”
“Yes please, one sugar, without milk.”
“We’re waiting on a milk delivery. I’ll bring you one without cream,” the waitress said, ready to depart.
“You really need to move to Paris, don’t you? Has that paradoxical line landed with anyone else?”
“A philosophy professor laughed as I served her the other day. She was reading Simone de Beauvoir so I was sure of my audience. She left me her copy of The Blood of Others. It’s up there next to her book, An Eye For Crime. She’s signed it. Dr Rebecca Dale, I think she’s well known in those circles. She also had a presence.”
“Perhaps we are drawn to the creative vacuum of the waiting room,” Swan offered. “From here we can bathe in the absence. The black coffee that comes with absence of cream.”
“I’ll bring the coffee and leave you to your absence.”
“Thanks. I think the absence is about to be coloured in with black ink. What is this music? I heard it yesterday.”
“It’s Dying Flame from a scented cassette by a friend of mine. The album is called AromaTape 001.”
“Scented? Where can I get a copy?” Swan asked, tilting her ear to the speaker.
“I think they’re all gone, but I’ll ask him. I think he sent you his first cassette years and years ago. He’s in here sometimes, easy to spot, just look for the singer with the suitcase full of flames.”
“He must have a big chunk of the lightning tree in that suitcase! What is that scent you’re wearing? It’s strangely familiar,” Swan said, leaning forward.
“It’s layers of the blue hour mixed with the red room.”
“I smell cherry blossom. What is that wound around your finger?” Swan asked, tapping the air.
“Luggage label thread. That’s where I carry the scent.”
“Here I was looking for Ariadne,” Swan said, pulling on the thread, “and she was only one door down from Lost and Found.”
Veronica Swan, on opening the matchbox fully, found a sequence of numbers and dots next to the word Hope written inside the now empty tray. As she pulled the tray out a lilac button and a luggage label fell onto the table. The button bounced, mirroring the spinning hubcap in the car chase, a scene she would add to the notebook seconds later, it circled through the whirlpool of her clasping hands before leaving the table. Gravity sucked it out of sight, just like the hairpin in the looking glass arcade in Turin. Veronica Swan moved her neck to the left and right but could not see the button. It was gone into the black hole floor. She looked at the luggage label. Written in fountain pen were the words ONLY MEANT FOR YOU.
LOST AND FOUND! Can you find the lilac button? Email a photograph of it next to your scented cassette to [email protected] to claim your prize.
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