No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (6 page)

Josh is bound to be away. It is August after all. Why would you bother hanging around Woodstock in August when
you’ve got a boat off Barbados and an apartment in Rome to choose from?

But he can’t be away, else Frank wouldn’t be invited to wait in the front gallery while the undertaker announces his presence in an anterior room. Unless it’s Mrs Green who hasn’t gone away.

The Alma-Tadema Roman bath-house is on the wall. Alongside a Lord Leighton Grecian spring. And an Etty steamroom. So this is a themed gallery. Bathing and showering. Women bathing and showering. In rivers. Streams. Lakes. Ponds. Bagnios. Turkish baths. Russian baths. Finnish baths.

The women bathe and shower with their bodies on a twist, an aerobically difficult three-quarters turn that enables the sun to dry their breasts and their buttocks simultaneously. Josh Green always was an arse man. Frank wonders whether this is a sign that art and experience have mellowed him into a tit man to boot.

A door opens to an adjoining room. The Sickert Room, where Frank espies him closing a deal – a disconcertingly strange yet familiar figure, like the father of an old friend. He has a pop star with him, whom Frank vaguely recognises but refuses to fish for a name for, and with the pop star is an equally renowned black model who stands discounted to one side, restless but faithful, like a borzoi. Frank assumes that the pop star is buying a painting, but the scene is equally suggestive of his selling the model. Or putting up one in part-exchange for the other.

The undertaker interposes his body between Frank and the objects of his curiosity. ‘I have told Mr Green you are here, sir.’ In the meantime, he gestures, if you would care to look about you in
this
room, observing the feeling for fleshtone which the great academicians brought to the painting of
ladies’ posteriors, you will be using your time wisely for once and, who knows, you may learn something.

However, he’s too late. Josh has seen him and recognised him and waved. This is the advantage, or not, of having your photograph above your column. Your appearance comes as no surprise to anyone. He waves back; a self-deprecatory dumb-show – don’t mind me, go on with what you’re doing, business is business, a couple of million smackers don’t come your way every day, whereas a friend –

Dumb all right. What if a couple of million smackers do come his way every day? His and Anna-Liisa’s?

Once he’s free – the short all-over-white pop star and his tall mahogany companion having made a sudden dash for it, darting out of a side entrance so as not to be spotted, and diving into the inconspicuousness of a thirty-foot limo – Josh proves to have changed little, on the exterior anyway, from the flushed owl-eyed familiar of those filthy minibus rides up and down the Banbury road. He is wearing a camel cardigan, not unlike the ones he used to teach in. And he is still estuarine in intonation. ‘Hello matey,’ he says. There are pink spots in his cheeks. ‘Long time no see.’

They embrace in the new manner of men. Arms around each other, lips to throat. Frank is glad he has lived until the age he has for this, if for no other reason – he has lived to kiss and be kissed by men. After centuries of shaking hands like butlers, heads bowed, stomachs tucked in, groins well back, men have started to nuzzle one another like bears. Frank is surprised how readily he’s taken to it; but now that nobody minds he’s not fucking them, the musky entanglement of moustaches, the abrasion of rough cheeks, are just about all he’s getting in the way of bodily love.

‘Well?’

They offer to admire each other, look each other up and down.

‘Well?’

Frank opens his arms wide, another of his dumb-shows meant to take in the enormity of Josh’s universe, his walls of showering nymphs, his chamberlain, his clinking troglodyte clientele, his chunk of Woodstock. ‘Terrific,’ he says. ‘This is terrific.’

Josh can’t get rid of the pink in his cheeks.
‘Was
terrific,’ he says. ‘Until John Major.’

‘John Major?’ It crosses Frank’s mind that John Major has been buying Stanley Spencers and not paying for them.

‘The recession, matey.’

They are standing in the Sickert room where, not that many minutes before, a deal of some magnitude was struck. You only have to look about you, at the alarm systems if not at the art, to see that there’s no other sort of deal you can strike in this room. Josh Green reads his thoughts. ‘He doesn’t come in every day, you know.’

Frank doesn’t know what to say. ‘Must be handy when he does, though,’ he tries.

‘He pays off what’s owing on my credit card. Do you know what it costs to run this place? Rates, insurance, staff, bank interest …?’

Josh never was one to hold back on embarrassing personal details. But this is quick.

‘… advertising, international fairs …’

‘I can imagine it must cost to corner the market in Camden Town nudes,’ Frank says. Wherever he looks, Camden Town nudes, Sickert’s wonderful sticky suburban trollops wasting the riches of their flesh in dying light.

Josh corrects him. ‘Mornington Crescent, most of them.’

‘Even costlier, then.’

‘You don’t think I own all these.’

‘Josh, I’ve got no idea what you own and what you don’t.
But I can’t believe you’re not proud of what you’ve achieved, you two. Together.’

‘Together?’ Josh Green scratches flesh at the corner of his left eye. ‘Who’s together?’

Frank knows not to get too excited too soon. A man can be not together with a Finn but very much together with a Swede. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘Not as sorry as I am. We had an apartment in Rome, she’s got that. We had a boat, she’s got that. She’s even got the Ferrari. I’m having to get about in her Fiesta.’

‘Is this recent?’

‘Too recent. We should have done it years ago. The passion goes out of it, matey. And that’s when you should call it a day, when the passion goes out of it.’

‘Josh, we’re middle aged. The passion is meant to go out of it.’

‘You sound like my daughter. Act your age, she tells me. Well I appreciate that, I tell her, coming from someone I’ve always tried to treat like a friend. Precisely my complaint, she tells me; I don’t want a friend, I want a father. Don’t come to me, then, the next time you
do
want a friend, I tell her.’

‘Do I remember a little girl from Oxford? Jeannie, was it?’

Josh pulls a face. Who cares what she’s called.

‘How’s she doing, anyway? Married? Kids of her own?’

‘Married? Joanne? Course not. She’s gay. Lives with a bird in Lewisham. They run an electrical business together.’

Frank lowers his virginal eyes. A generational thing. ‘Are you all right about that?’ he risks.

‘The electrical business?’

‘No, no, the – ‘ Frank swallows air, like a fish hauled out of water.

‘Just pulling your leg, matey. Yeah. We knew before she did. We were surprised it took her so long to find out. Anna-Liisa spotted it right away. You know how you notice things
when it’s not your own child. In a way she was closer to her than either Jill or I were. Perhaps because she couldn’t have any of her own.’

‘Jeannie?’

‘Anna-Liisa.’

So how are we going so far, Frank asks himself. Business – in trouble. Marriage – kaput. Relations with offspring – deeply flawed. Prospects of grandchildren – zilch. Way of life – fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. If he could bank on every visit to old friends going as well as this one, he’d do it more often.

He doesn’t want to see Josh Green unhappy. He just wants to be certain that fifty’s no good for anyone. Equality in dismay, that’s all he’s after.

‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ Josh says. Some of the merriment that Frank remembers from their language school days has returned to his eyes. ‘You’re thinking I’ve got a bird myself’

‘Whereas you haven’t.’

‘Whereas I have.’

‘And she’s the reason you and Anna-Liisa broke up?’

‘Not the reason. No. She was just someone I leaned on
while
we were breaking up. Her marriage was in trouble, too. We leaned on each other.’

‘When you say leaned …’

Josh pulls a photograph out of his wallet. ‘Look. What would you do?’

Frank holds his breath as the photograph comes into focus. Softly. Softly. But it’s all right. Not anyone he knows. Not anyone he can’t bear
not
to know. A squelchy blonde. Squinting in the sun, on the walkway of a marina. Wide apart eyes. Striped nautical jumper over good breasts. Slight blip below, where the belly is wanting to roll. Not so much a boat blonde as a boat blonde’s mother. Navy sail-cloth skirt
over deck shoes. Strong legs. Still. It’s the still part that’s upsetting. The defiance. The bravery. Death where is your sting-a-ling? Age where are your ravages? Frank has seen a painting in Josh’s gallery he would buy if only he were a pop star – a Matthew Smith nude rolling in colour, falling through an everywhere of paint, the creamy bedclothes unravelling as she whirls, but bearing her up like a lavishly upholstered magic carpet of clouds, her flesh buoyed, protected from all harm, inexpugnably alive. But Sickert’s truer. Forget space, time’s the issue. It doesn’t matter how voluptuously we turn a woman’s body through its planes, the moment we become conscious of it in time – the moment
she
becomes conscious of it in time – not all the paint in Camden Town can cushion it against tragedy. But Frank’s a sport. ‘I’d lean on her, too,’ he says, offering to return the photograph.

Josh isn’t ready to take it back. He waits, hungry for more appreciation. ‘So where did you meet her?’ is all Frank can think of asking.

‘Chicago Art Fair.’

‘You do a lot of fairs?’

‘Used to. Couldn’t resist them. You know what they say an art fair is?’

Frank doesn’t.

Josh Green the man is suddenly illuminated by Josh Green the boy. ‘A cunt mine.’

Frank’s too impressionable. He can’t hear of a cunt mine without wanting to go down it. But that’s all right by Josh. He waits, roseate with pride, for Frank, groggy with gas, to come back up.

‘And now that you’ve mined your treasure – ‘Frank starts to say. He means to turn a compliment, but he is anxious that his fidelity to the metaphor shouldn’t lead him back into the cunt of a woman he can hardly be said to know.

But that too is all right by Josh. He’s been waiting for Frank to open his eyes again only so that he can now close his own. Drowning momentarily was something he always did, Frank remembers, as a prelude to paying a sentimental compliment himself. When he surfaces he looks queerly transfigured, as though he’s glimpsed God’s face among the fishes. ‘Oh, matey,’ he says, ‘you should see her from behind. You should see the lovely little bum on her.’ He makes a mould of it with his hands for Frank’s behoof, a pair of trembling palms like scales for a fairy.

‘Josh, how old is she?’

‘Forty-eight, forty-nine. But the bum’s half that age. Peter Blake was going to use a photograph I’d taken of it for his Nine Prettiest Bottoms in the National Gallery …’

‘But?’

‘It isn’t in the National Gallery.’

He goes over to a drawer and begins sorting through some papers. Frank wonders if he’s going to bring out the photograph of the lovely little bum. Men do this. They confer publicly over photographs taken in the strictest and most solemn confidence. Frank has done it himself. Here you are boys, what think you of this? Nice, eh? Mine. Cunt mine. Mein Cunt. But not of Mel. Mel read him too well. Three weeks into their relationship she confiscated his camera. That was after confiscating all the photographs his camera had taken. He’s not sure he’s ever forgiven her. That you should destroy the previous lot in order to supplant them with poses of your own – that’s only just. But to cut off the supply both ends – where’s the fairness in that?

In fact what Josh removes from the drawer is a cutting from a not very recent
Tatler
showing his new love at an old ball, on a boat, shaking a leg with Onassis, circa 1970, about the time Frank was moving his own limbs preternaturally
slowly to ‘Je t’aime’. Sad. Frank isn’t the only one stuck in the past.

‘Tatler
voted her one of the ten most beautiful women in England,’ Josh says.

‘I can see why.’

‘What would you do if you were me?’

‘I’ve told you. I’d enjoy myself’

‘What would you do if you couldn’t enjoy yourself?’

‘What do you mean?’

Josh hesitates. Even for him there are words you can’t use without putting spaces round them. ‘If you had trouble getting it up?’

‘You can’t get it up?’

Josh pulls back from the finality of that. ‘Don’t know about
can’t.
Haven’t so far. I think it was the fight with Anna-Liisa. You know what it’s like: things get said. You lose your respect for yourself as a man.’

Know what it’s like? Yeah, Frank knows what it’s like, but he takes a moment to think about it, so that he can add to his list. Where was he? Marriage – kaput. Relations with offspring – deeply flawed. Dick – inoperative. Self regard – down the drain. ‘Isn’t it a question in the end,’ he says, ‘for … what is her name?’

‘Sara.’

Sara with an ah. Not Sarah with an air.

‘Isn’t it a question in the end for Sara? What does she think you should do about it?’

‘She doesn’t know. It’s never happened to her before. When you’ve been voted one of the ten most beautiful women in the country you’re used to men being able to fuck you. The first time it happened she sat on my face and cried and cried.’

‘And the second time?’

Josh tries to remember the second time. ‘I think she struck me.’

‘And even that didn’t work?’

‘Joke all you like, matey. It’s hurtful to a beautiful woman. And she’s just coming out of a painful marriage herself. On top of that she’s got to go into hospital for an operation. Only minor, we think, but there’ll be a scar. She’s frightened that’ll make it even harder for me.’

‘And will it?’

Josh shrugs.

They fall silent. An operation has entered the room. You never know with operations. Sensible, maybe, to concentrate on the scar. Never mind whether my lifeblood is draining out through a plug in the theatre floor; what if my lover will be put off by a two and a half inch suture above my bikini line? This is a gallery. And Josh is a connoisseur. Aesthetics matter. Perfection is everything.