Sometimes in life, a person just needs somewhere to be, a hideaway for a month or so during a fragile phase of change. It was during just such a phase in my own life, in late summer of 2000, when Romilly offered me a perch away from the world in her wonderful flat at the top of the Rue des Martyrs, on the slope of which antediluvian transvestites plied their trade. I remember lots of wonderful books and a suite of fake Rothkos that Romilly had painted and which more or less matched the sofa in the front room.
I had been trying to sort myself by copying out sections from St Augustine's Confessions, but it was my lovely chats with Romilly with her insightful humour, her stories from Prague (where we both had lived), and her tales of chance encounters with strangers in Pere La chaise and Madagascar, that did the trick.
It was on the doors of Romilly's fridge, not in the pages of a book , that I rediscovered the poems of William Blake whilst looking for the butter. Romilly clothed herself in poetry and literature, taking Yeats to heart, treading carefully with her own earthy sophistication through the world of mediocre things looking to create a space of beauty, just for the duration of a play or the time it takes to read a poem or smoke a cigarette.
Bless you dear Romilly
Mark
