Darkmans (40 page)

‘Oh come
on
,’ Kane debunked her, ‘I chose these shoes principally because they’re comfy…’

‘But you’ve been limping since you got here.’

‘Have I?’

Kane stared down at his feet, mystified, then looked up again, with a frown. ‘If you put your mind to it,’ he muttered, ‘it’s possible to transform
any
basic transaction into a deep and meaningful psychodrama…’

She smiled.

‘I mean for all you
really
know,’ Kane continued (secretly pleased – and encouraged – by her response), ‘the whole scenario might actually be
less
complicated than you think. Your artist might simply’ve
liked
red roses. Or’ve been especially good at painting them. I might’ve bought these shoes because I have unnaturally large feet and they were the only ones in the store that’d fit…’

‘Not store,’ she interrupted him, ‘shop.’

He gazed at her, surprised.

‘And you
don’t
,’ she said. ‘You have perfectly normal-sized feet. And those shoes plainly
aren’t
comfy. So why did you buy them, exactly?’

‘If I wasn’t wearing trainers, but brogues,’ he evaded her, ‘you’d probably decide I was sending out a message of
another
kind…’

‘And you would be,’ she maintained, calmly.

‘What? A message that I
don’t
like trainers, perhaps?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But d’you honestly think I’d be any less of a capitalist dupe for all of that? If I wore Doc Martens, for example, would I necessarily be more “free-thinking” or less constrained by social conditioning? Isn’t that all just a part of the same bullshit conspiracy?’

‘Doc Martens are manufactured in the UK,’ she countered. ‘They don’t depend on the exploitation of third world labour…’ ‘It’s entirely possible,’ he speculated, ‘that there may be serious Human Rights issues in the country – or countries – where they source their rubber…’

‘Wouldn’t life be so much
simpler
,’ she deadpanned, ‘if you could just manufacture your own shoes from scratch?’

Kane’s phone suddenly began to vibrate. He pulled it from his pocket and inspected it, scowling.

‘Although if you made your own shoes you’d be a shoe-maker,’ she reasoned (half to herself), ‘and in medieval times people involved in trades connected to the feet were generally ostracised.’

‘Why?’ He glanced up.

‘Because people’s beliefs were incredibly literal. They thought the devil had cloven hooves and that his followers did too. People who chose to work in trades relating to the feet were often suspected of an involvement with the occult.’

Kane’s mind turned briefly to Elen: her neat hands, her modest dress, her birthmark.

‘That’s insane,’ he said, impatiently stuffing his phone away again.

‘I know. Life
was
insane,’ she concurred. ‘It was brutal, cruel, savage, and yet, by the same token…’ she pointed to the image of the Madonna, ‘breathtakingly beautiful.’ She paused, and then quoted, ‘“So violent and motley was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.”’

He scowled at her.

‘Johan Huizinga.
The Waning of the Middle Ages.
I first came across it in my late teens and it completely redefined my take on things. Huizinga’s book celebrates a culture in decline – the
end
of a historical period – which was actually quite a radical undertaking at the time…’

‘Which time?’ Kane asked.

‘The 1920s.’

‘The end of the Great War…’

She nodded. ‘Too often – in my experience, at least – history concentrates on the start of things, but why should a period’s decline be any less significant?’

Kane shrugged.

‘Huizinga outlines in the book,’ she continued, ‘why the Renaissance had to happen. How it set people free. How it liberated the mind by replacing the visual…’ she pointed to the picture of the Madonna ‘…this complex medieval conglomeration of minute, self-referential
detail
– with the conceptual – with actual thought, unmanacled. It allowed people to think outside all of those stultifying ideological restrictions – those empty
forms
which were – to a large extent – deeply bound up in matters of social etiquette and faith. Central to Huizinga’s argument is the idea that unity and truth were somehow completely lost – almost suffocated – inside this meaningless “aggregation of details”.’

She paused. ‘Not a million miles away – in many respects – from how we live life today.’

‘You think modern life is
medieval
?’

Kane was patently going to take some convincing.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Give me one example,’ Kane challenged her.

‘Okay…’ she gladly took up his gauntlet, ‘if you ask any expert in the field what the single most notable social characteristic of medieval life was they’d probably say the bells. It might sound strange now, but bells pretty much defined the age. They tolled for every occasion – the start of curfew, the end of curfew, the arrival of a dignitary, the prospect of danger. Quiet was an anomaly. Life was all clamour. And now, after several hundred years of relative social calm and tranquillity, we’ve developed the mobile phone which also chimes – and must be
allowed
to chime – at every avaliable opportunity. But instead of bringing social unity, instead of connecting us more intimately to our social peers and neighbours, it actively divides us, it isolates us, it encourages an atmosphere of merciless self-involvement parading in the guise of spurious conviviality…’

‘Fine,’ Kane smiled, ‘so you don’t like the phone…’

She shifted her weight, leaned her hip against the desk, then calmly continued, ‘In medieval life the higher echelons of society celebrated levels of cupidity – of excess; their huge
feasts
, their crazy
processions
, their ornate
costumes
– that were, by any historical standard,
almost obscene. Here, today, deep inside the belly of the decadent West, we cheerfully do the same. We define our power and our status – just as they did – through meaningless and gratuitous acts of consumption. The phrase all you kids like to use, I believe, is
bling.
’

Kane smirked. He opened his mouth to say something…

‘And how about their obsession with Courtly Love?’ she demanded, jumping in first. ‘The tournaments, the jousts, the chivalrous knights and all those bizarre and convoluted rituals of etiquette – those fauxhistorical games of
form
, which weren’t actually historical at all; the cult of King Arthur, for example? All neatly echoed in our present-day passion for, say,
Star Wars
, or
The Matrix…The Lord of the Rings.
Harry bloody Potter. All invented mythologies. We inhabit these worlds as if they are real. We respond to them intellectually although they aren’t
remotely
intelligent. We encourage our children to play computer games which seek to simulate life, to mirror it, because we’re too afraid to let them step outside their own front doors. We allow them to fight violent, artificial wars on screen while we carefully remove ourselves – and them – physically, from the consequences of actual conflict, with our long-range warheads and our missiles…’

‘But how,’ Kane quickly leapt in, ‘can we be more violent
and
less, all at the same time…?’

‘It’s the perfect medieval mind-set,’ she exclaimed, ‘don’t you see? To experience something so intensely but as a strange kind of
denial.
I mean it’s tragic,’ she persisted, ‘almost laughable, that our greatest invention – the computer – a device intended to set us free to live lives
unconstrained
by mindless detail – has actually ended up binding us more thoroughly to life’s minutiae by filling the world with reams of useless – often unreliable – information; with this endless, this empty, this almost unstoppable
babble…
’

‘Perhaps you underestimate normal people,’ Kane said, quite appalled by her diatribe, ‘both back then
and
now. Perhaps the largest percentage of us just slip under the radar, live life – quite happily – in that outer garden, that pagan garden, but history simply doesn’t see fit to acknowledge our quiet and uncomplicated role in it.’

As he spoke she idly turned the pages of her scrapbook. ‘Beede has this fascinating theory on language…’ she said.

‘Beede?’

‘Yes.’

‘What kind of theory?’

‘It’s complicated, but he thinks that the Renaissance took place – in Britain, at least – because of the evolution of English – that our language grew and developed towards the end of the Middle Ages and functioned as a necessary radicaliser, as a harbinger of the new. Because language won’t be restricted. Because language is uncontainable. Like a fast-running river. It bubbles up and splashes and spills. English wasn’t the obfuscating Latin of the Bible or the exclusive, courtliness of French. It had this unconstrained, grass-roots honesty and power. In effect, he thinks that our native language didn’t just
describe
change, it actively
stimulated
it.’

Kane was staring down at the painting on the page she’d just turned to.

‘Is that a Lochner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow…’

He drew closer to the image, both fascinated and revolted.

‘It’s
The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew.
Vile, isn’t it?’

Kane nodded.

‘What you need to remember,’ she counselled, ‘is that Lochner and his contemporaries lived lives of great extremity, of violent contrast. Huizinga says how the outlines of all things were much more clearly marked back then, and that’s represented here, visually, in the very modern way in which the artist has outlined the silhouettes of Bartholomew’s torturers…’

Kane inspected the silhouettes, frowning. Then he shuddered.

‘It’s hard to really understand the dark, for example, if you always have ready access to light, or the cold if you have constant access to heat, or real distance if you never actually
walk
anywhere…’

‘Walk?’ Kane scoffed. ‘Did you ever try and do
anything
on foot in this town?’

‘In
Ashford
?’ she chuckled. ‘Are you kidding? It’s such an astonishing
muddle
, for one thing – such a
puzzle.
It’s like history in paradigm. At its centre beats this tiny, perfect, medieval heart, but that heart is surrounded – obfuscated – by all these conflicting layers; a chaos of buildings and roads from every conceivable time-frame. It’s pure, architectural mayhem. A completely non-homogeneous town, utterly half-cocked, deliriously ramshackle…And then, clumsily imposed on top – the icing on the cake – this whole crazy mish-mash of through-roads and round-roads and intersections and dead-ends –
Business Parks, Superstores, train stations, train tracks – which slice blithely through all the other stuff, apparently
aiding
it on the one hand, yet completely
disregarding
it on the other…’ she paused, ruminatively. ‘You’re right: Ashford’s a fantastic contradiction; a city which professes to celebrate journeying while being basically almost unnavigable on foot.’

Kane continued to stare at
The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew
while she spoke. He found the painting oddly mesmerising. In it he saw six men degrading a naked saint who lay on his belly (tied by two strands of rope, at his waist, to a table). The saint was fully conscious, and he didn’t look especially saintly, or – his halo aside, obviously – particularly or indefinably different to his torturers. He could’ve been
any
of them.

And he wasn’t just receiving the torture, passively, he was propping himself up, on to his elbow, and glancing over his shoulder (irate, almost) as one of his attackers – knife between his teeth – matter-of-factly prised back a huge, clean sheet of his skin.

Below the table, an old man casually and cheerfully sharpened the knives. Further along, a man dressed in white idly pushed a blade into the saint’s thigh.

‘What you see here is the spectacle of torture,’ she said. ‘Life back then was all about the spectacle: the noble majesty of princes, the pious grandeur of the Church, the extreme poverty of beggars, the righteous savagery of public executions. And the spectacle – in this instance – is rendered all the more awful by the casual demeanours of the men actually implementing it. In the Middle Ages they had no concept of leniency. They believed in the two extremes of cruel punishment or absolute mercy. Something was either right or wrong. There were no grey areas. No middle ground. A crime was an insult against society and God and it had to be punished – even celebrated – accordingly.’

‘Well thank God for the grey areas, huh?’ Kane murmured.

‘You think modern life’s all in neutrals?’ she wondered.

‘Isn’t that what you’ve just been arguing?’

‘I’d’ve thought you’d be hard pressed to find
anything
more black and white,’ she smiled, ‘than the British tabloid press. Or the deranged philosophies of Al Q’aeda, come to that…’

‘How much is it worth?’ Kane wondered, walking back over to the hot bench again (choosing not to engage with her any further on these points).

‘Although – somewhat
ironically
,’ she continued, undeterred, ‘in medieval times it was principally the Islamic faith which strove to expand the world’s intellectual boundaries – their Arabic translations of the early works of Aristotle, for example; and it was the advent of Caxton’s Printing Press which helped to solidify and proliferate the English Renaissance through the ready provision of cheap, topical reading matter…’

Kane was bending over the bench and closely scrutinising the canvas. ‘It seems so tiny,’ he said, fascinated. ‘I’d love to actually
see
it.’

‘I paid 200,000,’ she finally answered his earlier enquiry, ‘which I thought was a snip.’

He glanced up, impressed. ‘And how much will you sell it for?’

She shrugged. ‘That’s anyone’s guess. It all depends on whether I can establish any kind of provenance…’

‘You’ll restore it yourself?’

‘If I can. For the most part.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘Probably.’

‘So who did you buy it from?’