The Bat Tattoo (19 page)

‘No one seems to be taking much notice,’ I said. ‘He probably thought he was the main character in this scene but he’s quite small in the overall picture.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Yes, but sometimes we’re smaller than other times.’

He raised his eyebrows at that, then looked at his watch. ‘Got time for a coffee after this?’

‘Yes.’ We went along pretty quickly and were soon in Gallery 8 and the last part of the exhibition. We did the room clockwise, and so came to Caravaggio’s
The Madonna
di Loreto
before the last wall and his
The Entombment
. The humble pilgrim couple with dirty bare feet, kneeling at the door with hands clasped prayerfully, looked up at the Virgin with the Child in her arms. ‘Just imagine,’ I said, ‘making that pilgrimage to the Virgin and having her answer the door.’

‘Her name was Lena. According to one of my books she sat for Caravaggio so often that a notary called Pasqualone became jealous; Caravaggio wounded him in a duel or a fight of some kind and had to get out of Rome so he went to Genoa.’

‘With Lena?’

‘I don’t think so; the book doesn’t say.’

‘She looks like a woman men might fight over. I wonder if being the Virgin in that painting had any effect on her life; I wonder how she felt about it as she got older.’

‘You think, maybe years later, she’d go to the church where the picture was hanging and tell people, “That’s me, that’s how I used to look.’”

I thought she might have done that. ‘And after all,’ I said, ‘she used to be a virgin too.’

‘Up to a point, certainly.’

Now we were stood in front of
The Entombment
. Through the galleries I had seen Christ taken by soldiers, mocked, crowned with thorns, shown to the populace, and crucified. His face and body had changed from one painter to the next and even Caravaggio’s Christs differed one from the other, but now all these images had mingled and precipitated this heavy mortal residue of the dead Christ being lowered on to a stone slab. His mouth was open, holding a silence.

I needed to be alone after that but I’d said I’d have coffee with Peter so I did. The ground-floor restaurant murmured and clattered around us; the lamps accentuated the dimming
of the winter afternoon beyond the windows. ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Peter. ‘I think I’ve come between you and your thoughts.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘They won’t go away. How’s your work going?’

‘Nothing much happening at the moment. My paintings used to come from an emptiness in me; now I’ve lost that empty space.’

‘How did you lose it?’

‘It got filled up with Amaryllis.’

‘Worse things could happen.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining — I’m happier than I’ve ever been; it’s just that I feel a little strange, like when you come out of a cinema into bright sunlight.’

‘Maybe you need mental dark glasses.’

‘I’ll work on that. There’s Seamus Flannery.’ He waved to a man carrying a tray. ‘Seamus!’ he said. ‘Come and sit with us.’

Seamus was a pleasant-looking man, bald and somewhat portly. I guessed him to be a few years older than I. He said, ‘Hi,’ put his coffee and scone on the table, got rid of his tray, and shook hands with me while Peter introduced us. ‘That’s some exhibition,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to come back two or three more times.’

‘Harold would have been here every day making notes,’ said Peter. ‘Harold Klein,’ he said to me, ‘an art historian friend of ours who died two years ago.’

‘Of a 14 bus,’ said Seamus.

‘“Of a 14 bus”?’ I said.

‘He stepped in front of it,’ said Seamus. ‘He and the 14 had a very complex relationship.’

I shook my head in condolence and also to express that there was nowt so queer as folk.

‘As I was looking at the paintings,’ said Seamus, ‘I was thinking of things to say to Harold but there isn’t any Harold any more. I wonder if you ever get used to that kind of thing.’

‘After a while it stops,’ I said, ‘and you just shake your head from time to time when you think of how all the days and nights of that person are gone out of the world; what they did, what they said — all gone.’

Seamus gave me a long look. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is a process of one goneness after another.’

‘That includes ideas,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll have to content myself with portraits and nudes for the time being.’

‘Yours is a hard life,’ said Seamus. ‘Try to find what consolations you can.’

‘Do my best,’ said Peter. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m off to meet Amaryllis. See you.’

‘What do you do?’ I asked Seamus after Peter had left.

‘I teach at the National Film School and I write for radio and television. The radio stuff’s been on the air; the television hasn’t been.’

‘Was there a time before you were doing that,’ I said, ‘when you knew that was what you wanted to do and you made it happen or did you just fall into it?’

‘Knowing what you want to do can be like the 14 bus,’ said Seamus. ‘Sometimes it’s a long time coming.’ Now it was his turn to look at his watch. ‘I must leave now. Nice meeting you.’ He shook my hand and left.

‘Not just the 14,’ I said. But he was gone. I had another coffee and thought about Sarah Varley whom I hadn’t seen since
Judith Beheading Holofernes;
I wondered what she did with herself when she wasn’t stalling out.

On my way back to Green Park tube station I was thinking
about Peter and Amaryllis. She’s not only very beautiful, she’s bewitching, like the nymphs in the Waterhouse painting who drowned Hylas; and when I’d seen them together Peter seemed truly bewitched. Now he’d lost the empty space that his paintings came from. That, at least, was not one of my problems — I had more empty space than I knew what to do with.

Back at the studio the lime was waiting for me in that intimidatingly objective north light. The crucified wooden hand lay on the work-bench; I’d thought of putting it up on the wall but I’d hesitated — I didn’t want to be pushy. Now I decided that I
would
be pushy so I took some Blu-Tack and fastened it to the wall over the work-bench. ‘Anything you can do,’ I said, ‘will be greatly appreciated.’

The many faces and bodies of Christ were in my mind and I was expecting a long conversation with him but all that came to me was Caravaggio’s
Ecce Homo
. He was a typical Caravaggio in physique, very slight, almost girlish. He looked so meek, so submissive, so humble and unpretentious, that I didn’t quite know where to put myself with him.

As I faced my glued-together lime once more I found a thought in my mind:
Let the wood come to you
. So I did, and this time the adze didn’t bite me.

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman’s hand on a necklace, a man’s hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, ceased entirely?

Market trading is not a spiritual pursuit but maybe there is nothing that hasn’t got a spiritual side. All of us at our stalls selling the oddments of unknown lives, tarnished medals, broken watches, cloudy mirrors — are we not extending those lives beyond their deaths?

The wooden hand that I gave Roswell Clark, whose was the hand that carved it, whose ghost-touch still lingers on it? Will it let go of me now that I’d passed it on? Somehow I doubt it. Will it get a grip on him? Why do I get involved with unfinished men? Not a romantic involvement but I can feel myself willing him to do something, to make a big step forward. And he’s not eager to make that step. What can I say? I’m sorry about this.

I don’t think about Roswell Clark all the time; there are
other things on my mind. I was greatly relieved to read in
The Times
that the Pope has apologised to the Greeks for the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders. Elsewhere I saw that the German industrial giant, von Peng International Industries, had finally yielded to the demands of surviving ex-slave labourers. VPI was going to pay them each three thousand pounds while pointing out that the claims of the ex-slave labourers were not altogether justified by the quality of their work; VPI had paid the SS three Reichsmarks per day for each unskilled concentration-camp inmate, four for skilled ones, and one and a half for children; these costs and the compensation were both considered excessive by von Peng International but in the interests of leaving the past behind they were doing the handsome thing. Following on this report came the news that VPI was being restructured, their munitions, industrial chemical, telecommunications, steel-making, oil refining, and pharmaceutical divisions being decentralised under new management; this not surprisingly wiped a good deal of value off VPI shares but somehow the world staggers on and presumably VPI still has a bob or two with which to continue its many enterprises. VPI’s gallantry doesn’t quite rank with that of the gentleman who bought Maria Callas’s underwear and burnt it but it’s better than a poke in the eye with an electrified fence.

Hi. How you doing? This is R. Albert Streeter speaking, the same who was only a short time ago Adelbert Delarue. There was Delarue in Paris, now Hopla! here is Streeter in the Big Apple. The past is behind us. I am now an American billionaire. Big hat, much cattle, as we Yanks say. It goes; life goes on wherever it goes.

As in the song, so with me: the fundamental things do not change as time goes by. I have long been a patron of the arts and now I have in mind to make a larger commitment than before: yes, I think of opening a museum in London. I have acquired a first-class modern building designed by the internationally famous architect Wolfgang Krumm; with some alterations it will soon be ready for an exhibition of exciting and provocative works by artists competing for the R. Albert Streeter Prize of fifty thousand pounds. Folsom Bray, who was Director of the Post-Modern Gallery, will be Director of the R. Albert Streeter Museum and he will be as a chair for judges of suitable augustness. It is my especial desire to encourage artists whose talent has not yet been recognised and I hope there will be many interesting entries.

So, this ends my first report from the Big Apple, where the natives are always restless and the banks are friendly.

As I worked I asked myself from time to time, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Because it seems to want me to, was the only answer I could think of. I let the wood come to me and as I progressed safely from adze to chisel and gouge I watched my blades cutting away whatever wasn’t the it that I was doing. Or maybe it was doing me.

In
The Times
this morning there was a tiny little item from Bangalore. The people of Karnataka, it said, are worshipping a one hundred-tonne rock that fell off the back of a truck. This rock was on its way to a temple where it was going to be carved into an image of the monkey-god Hanuman. Every time I think of that I shake my head and smile. Very perceptive, those Karnatakans.

Christmas went away eventually, and by the middle of January London was functioning more or less fully. The new year seemed a thin and dreary thing but possibly that was post-Christmas depression.

I hadn’t talked to Roswell Clark since the Royal Academy, and that hadn’t really been a conversation. I was mentally leaning forward to help him uphill — I felt that he was climbing
some
kind of hill, perhaps pushing a big rock ahead of him, but I didn’t know what the hill was and I didn’t know what the rock was. What did he do with his time? ‘Private commissions’ was what he’d told me and that was all he’d told me. I wanted to see for myself what he was doing but I didn’t know where he lived and I didn’t have his telephone number. I’d seen him at the V & A, Covent Garden, and the Royal Academy. This being a Saturday I wasn’t at the Jubilee Market but it was my guess that he avoided that and the other two places on weekends.

Whatever he was doing, why did it matter so much to me? My first impression of him was that he was a failer but were my first impressions to be trusted completely? My experience with Giles had left me feeling that I was attracted to men
who needed improving. Was I attracted to Roswell Clark? Not really, I told myself, but I couldn’t help being curious about him.

I had the feeling he might be local, near rather than far. This was a free Saturday; I could do what I liked. I put on a coat and a woollen hat and went out with no particular destination in mind but wondering if I might run into him. The day was dismal, cold and grey. For no reason at all I crossed Parsons Green and paused at the White Horse pub. The tables outside were empty; inside there were only a few people. It was a little after three and I don’t usually drink that early in the day but I got a glass of Merlot and took it over to a table.

A young couple came in; the woman sat down at a nearby table while the man went to fetch the drinks. She was very pretty, nice figure, wearing tight jeans and a loose Fair Isle pullover. She looked a little truculent. What have you got to look truculent about? I thought. You’re young, you’re pretty, your whole life is before you.

The man came to the table with two pints, put one in front of her, sat down, and lifted his glass to her but she didn’t respond. He was a nice-looking City type and his manner made me think that he was the one who always made an effort to please. It won’t help, I thought. ‘Well, Hilary …’ he said.

‘Well, what?’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?’

She took a good pull at her pint before answering. ‘Our expectations aren’t the same.’

‘How do they differ?’

‘You seem to think we have a basis for a long-term future.’

‘What is it
you
think we have?’

‘
Had
. It was one of those interim things, and you knew that very well from the outset. You’d have liked there to be more but that’s all there was and you’ve had it, so now it’s time for you to move on to the next thing.’