Athena Page 13

  I wonder if she believed my tale, my tall tale?

  But how good it felt, telling her. The crepuscular light, the silence all about, and her beside me with her face half turned away. I have made her wear her veil again; how like a grille it looks: the confessional, of course. Oh, absolve me!

  Down in the street the newsboys were crying the evening editions.

  ‘I know a man,’ I said, ‘who killed a woman once.’

  She was silent for a moment, looking off from under lowered lashes.

  ‘Oh yes?’ she said. ‘Who did he kill?’

  ‘A maid in a rich man’s house.’ How quaint it sounded, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. The bad thief went to the rich man’s mansion to steal a picture and when the maid got in his way he hit her on the head and killed her dead. ‘Then they took him away,’ I said, ‘and locked him up and made him swallow the key.’ And from that durance he is still waiting for release.

  Such stillness.

  But why am I in my bathrobe, when obviously she has just come in from outside? I could feel the little slivers of chill air that fell out of the folds of her jacket (three bright black buttons, cutaway pockets, a narrow velvet collar: see, I remember everything) as she stood up and walked tick-tock tick-tock to the window and stood looking out with her arms folded and her face turned away from me. Sometimes I seem to glimpse it through another’s eyes, that simpler place, that Happy Valley of the heart where I long one day to wander, if only for an hour, hand in hand, perhaps, with my dead.

  Day fails before the advancing dusk. I am there again, as if the moment cannot end. The wind bellows mutedly in the street and the window shudders, great indistinct dark clouds are churning like soiled sea-waves above the huddled roofs. My tears have dried, my face feels like glass. In the tin-coloured light at the window A. was turning to shadowed stone and when she spoke it was with a sibyl’s unreal voice. She began to tell me the story of how when she was a schoolgirl in Paris she had run away from the convent and spent a night in a brothel, going with anyone who wanted her, twenty or thirty faceless men, she had lost count. She had never felt so real and at the same time detached, floating free of herself, of everything. She lifted her hand and made an undulant gesture in the dusk’s dimming glow. ‘Like that,’ she said softly. ‘Free.’

  5. Capture of Ganymede 1620

  L.E. van Ohlbijn (1573-1621)

  Oil on copper, 7¾ × 7 in. (19.2 × 17.8 cm.)

  Although he is not best known as a miniaturist, van Ohlbijn puts his skills, modest though they may be, to finest use when working on a small scale, as we can see from this charmingly executed little scene, a curiosity among this curious collection. What strikes us first is the artist’s determination to avoid sentimentality – a determination the true result of which, some commentators believe, is a complete absence of sentiment, surely not the effect that was intended: a case, we may say, of throwing the bath-water out with the baby, or boy, in this instance. That doesn’t sound right. Van Ohlbijn has combined in this work the homely skills of the Dutch genre painter that he was, with some scraps of learning brought back with him from a winter spent in Venice and Rome in the early 1600s. We detect influences as disparate as Tintoretto, in the dash and dramatic pace of the piece, and Parmigianino in the curious elongation of the figures, while the almost vertiginous sense of elevation and dreamlike buoyancy anticipates the skyborne works of Gaulli and Tiepolo. There is evidence also, in the softness of textures and the diaphanous quality of the paint surface, that van Ohlbijn on his Italian journey studied with application the work of Perugino and Raphael. The figure of Ganymede is admirably fashioned, being both an individual, wholly human boy (the painter is said to have used his son as a model), and an emblematic representation of ephebic beauty. How affecting is the conjunction of the creatural grace and delicacy of this young male, with his Phrygian cap and his mantel thrown back over his shoulder, and the ferocity and remorseless power of the feral bird that holds him fast in its terrible talons. In the eagle’s muscled upward straining, its fierce eye and outstretched neck and flailing, bronzen wings, are manifested the power and pitiless majesty of the god. This is not our Father who is in Heaven, our guardian in the clouds; this is the deus invidus who kills our children, more Thanatos than Zeus Soter. Although the boy is bigger than the bird we are in no doubt as to which is the stronger: the talons clasped upon the narrow thighs are flexed with a peculiar delicacy yet we can feel their inescapable strength, while Ganymede’s outflung arm communicates a deeply affecting sense of pain and loss and surrender. The gesture is at once a frantic appeal for help and a last, despairing farewell to the mortal world from which the boy has been plucked. In contrast, the attitude of the boy’s father, King Tros, standing on the mossy pinnacle of Mount Ida, seems overstated and theatrical. His hands are lifted in impotent pleading and tears course down his cheeks. We do not quite credit his grief. He has the air of a man who knows he is being looked at and that much is expected of him. Why, we wonder, has the artist’s judgment failed him here? Has he allowed an access of anxiety or personal sorrow to guide his hand into this overblown depiction of paternal distress? Those tears: he must have painted them with a brush made of a single sable hair. Remember how I showed them to you through the magnifying glass? Your breath forming on the picture, engreying the surface and then clearing, so that the scene kept fading and coming back as if appearing out of a mountain mist. There was a tiny mole on your cheek that I had not noticed before, with its own single hair. ‘Why would he bother?’ you said. So that one day, my love, you and I would lean with our heads together here like this in the quiet and calm of a rainy afternoon and be for a moment almost ourselves. Hebe in the clouds looks on as the boy is borne towards her in her father’s claws. Does she see in him the usurper who will take her place as cupbearer to the deathless ones? She holds in her hands the golden bowl the god will take from her, his daughter, and give to the mortal boy. Everyone loses, in the end. Some little time after completing this painting van Ohlbijn, in grief at the loss of his beloved son and, so it is said, abandoned by a mistress, drank poison from a gilded cup and died on the eve of his forty-eighth birthday. The gods have a sense of humour but no mercy.

  More immediately alarming to me than any of my own ghosts were the living phantoms who haunted the house. I was in constant fear that someone would click open the secret door some afternoon and discover us cavorting on the couch or sprawled steaming and exhausted on the floor with our limbs in a tangle. I am still amazed it never happened. Or maybe it did? Maybe Francie did get in one day when we were too absorbed to notice him – I believe that man could slip through a crack in a wall – and quietly withdrew again, pocketing our secret. He seemed to be always about, clambering up and down the house with that lopsided gait. He had an unnerving way of materialising silently out of doorways or on shadowed landings: a hand, an eye, that smile, and then that clicking noise that he produced out of the side of his mouth as if he were geeing up a horse. He had a little mocking salute that he would give me, lifting two fingers to his forehead and letting them fall lazily sideways. It amused him to feign large surprise when he came upon me, halting in his tracks with an exaggerated, wide-eyed stare and dropping open his mouth in a silent exclamation of mock amazement and delight. One day I met him with Gall the painter at the turn of the corridor outside our room. I had thought it was A. approaching and had been about to call out her name (ah, the eager gaiety of brand-new lovers!). He must have seen the alarm in my face. He stopped and grinned. Gall, slouching along in his wake, almost collided with him, and swore and gave me a bilious stare. Gall was a squat, bearded person with a big, unlikely-looking belly, as if a couple of cushions were stuffed inside his paint-stained pullover. He had very small, dark, sharp eyes and a clown’s red nose. He carried himself stiffly, gasping a little and listing to one side, as though he were strapped too tightly into his clothes. This tense, leaning stance gave him an air of resentfulness and barely restrained hostility. (H
ow I love them, these incidental grotesques!) I had the impression, even at a distance of yards, of unwashed flesh and undergarments badly in need of changing. ‘Who’s this?’ he growled. Francie made elaborate and sardonic introductions. ‘… And this is Gall,’ he said, ‘artist and, like yourself, Mr Morrow, a scholar.’ Gall gave a snort of phlegmy laughter and turned away, making an ill-aimed kick at Prince the dog, which stood at point on the landing with glistening snout delicately uplifted, seeming as always to be peering this way and that over the backs of a milling pack of its fellows. I was hot with anxiety, picturing A. hurrying up the stairs with her head down in that way she had and stopping dead at the sight of us. Francie was studying me with quiet enjoyment. ‘You’re looking a bit agitated,’ he said. ‘Are you expecting a visitor?’ Gall had started down the stairs. ‘Are we right, for Christ’s sake?’ he called back angrily. Francie touched my arm. ‘Come on and have a drink with us,’ he whispered. ‘Gall is gas.’

  We went down to the big empty room where I had first met Morden. The trestle or whatever it was still hung by its frayed ropes from the ceiling and the soiled white sheet was still draped from the high corner of a window. Frail sunlight of late autumn was arranged in trapezoids on the floor. We sat down on dusty bentwood chairs that cracked and groaned under us in geriatric complaint. Gall had a stone jug with a handle at the neck through which he hooked his thumb and hoisted the jug to his shoulder and drank a deep draught, his adam’s apple bobbing.

  ‘Ach!’ he said and grimaced, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Good stuff, eh?’ Francie said.

  Gall offered me the jug. His eyes were watering. ‘Poteen,’ he said hoarsely. ‘The missus makes it in the back shed.’

  Francie laughed. ‘Champagne is Mr Morrow’s tipple,’ he said.

  They watched with interest as I took a tentative slug, trying not to think of Gall’s wet little pursed-up mouth on the rim. No taste to speak of, just a flash of silvery fire on the tongue and then a spreading burn.

  ‘Mind the backwash now,’ Francie said gaily.

  I passed the jug to him and he shouldered it expertly and drank. Now my eyes were watering.

  ‘Spuds,’ Gall said with satisfaction. ‘You can’t beat the spuds.’

  As I think I began to say elsewhere, I have always had a distressing weakness for the low life. It is a taste that sits ill with what I consider otherwise to be a dignified, not to say patrician, temperament. In the old days, the days of my travels, I could sniff out the worst dives within an hour of arriving in this or that new place. The lower the haunt and more disreputable its denizens the better I liked it. Something to do with danger, I think, that thrilling, fluttery feeling under the diaphragm, and with transgression, the desire to smear myself with a little bit of the world’s filth. For I never felt that I belonged in those squalid places – quite the opposite, in fact. I would sit on a high stool with an elbow leaning on the bar and a misted glass of something ice-blue and toothsomely noxious in my hand and watch for whole afternoons (daytime was always best) with admiration and a certain wistful enviousness the doings of people who in their small-scale wickednesses were more natural, more authentic, than I knew I could ever manage to be. They had, some of them, the men especially, a nervous elegance and an air of hair-trigger alertness that seemed to me the characteristics of the true grown-up, the real man of the world. Then there was the other type, of whom Gall was a fine example, all resentment and sullen self-absorption and bottled-up rage. Which kind would I be, I wonder? A mixture of the two, perhaps? Or something altogether other, and far worse. The jug came back to me and this time I took a good long fiery gulp and passed it on to Gall and grinned and with what was intended to be irony called out ‘Cheers!’

  They were discussing a painter of their acquaintance whose name was Packy Plunkett.

  ‘He’s only a piss-artist,’ Gall said, ‘that’s all he is.’

  Francie nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘He can do the business, though,’ he said, and winked at me.

  Gall’s pocked brow darkened.

  ‘A piss-artist!’ he said again, clawing violently and audibly at his straggly beard that looked like a species of lichen that had taken hold of his face.

  The jug returned. How swiftly it was circulating. I recalled stories of wild men of the west driven mad by poteen, their brains turned to stirabout and their tongues rotted in their heads. It all seemed very funny.

  I drank to their health again and said, ‘Cheers!’ more loudly this time, and laughed.

  Gall gave me a sour look. ‘Sláinte,’ he said with heavy emphasis, and turned to Francie and jerked a thumb in my direction. ‘What is he,’ he said, ‘some sort of a West Brit, or what?’

  Presently I noticed that the light was taking on a thickened, sluggish quality and somewhere at the heart of things a vast pulse was slowly thudding. I wanted to leave but somehow could not think exactly how to stand up; it was not a physical difficulty but rather a matter of mental organisation. This predicament was more interesting than distressing, and greatly amusing, of course. I felt like a rubber ball trapped out at the end of an elastic that stretched, fatly thrumming, all the way up the stairs to the secret room where I pictured A. waiting for me, squatting on the end of the couch, a cigarette smouldering in the corner of her mouth and one eye shut against the smoke, with her chin on her knees and clutching her cold feet in her hands, my monkey girl. I wonder if when you were with me you too experienced those swings between desire and tedium that I found so disconcerting. On occasion, even as I pressed you in my arms I would find myself longing to be somewhere else, alone and unhindered. (Why am I talking like this, why am I saying these things, when all I really mean to do is send up a howl of anguish so frightful and so piercing you would hear it no matter where you are and feel your blood turn to water.) There was a sort of trickling sensation in my sinuses and I realised with a faint start of surprise and, mysteriously, of satisfaction, that I was on the point of tears.

  ‘The thing about my stuff is,’ morose Gall was saying, ‘the best of it is not appreciated.’

  Francie chuckled. ‘You can say that again,’ he said, and the dog, lying at his feet, looked up at him with its head held at what seemed an admonitory tilt.

  Gall’s jackdaw eyes were filming over and his pitted nose had turned from cherry-red to angry purple.

  I enquired, in a tone of grand accommodation, snuffling up those unshed tears, what kind of painting it was that he did (I think at that stage I still thought he could only be a house-painter). He threw me another soiled glance but disdained to answer.

  ‘Figurative!’ Francie cried, lifting his hands and moulding rounded shapes out of the air. ‘Lovely things. Woodland scenes, girls in their shifts.’ He clapped a hand on my knee. ‘You should have a look at them, I’m telling you: right up your alley!’

  Gall glared at him. ‘Shut the fuck up, Francie,’ he said in a slurred voice.

  I began to tell them about my encounter with Inspector Hackett. It seemed to me a very droll tale, which I illustrated with large gestures and what struck me as a particularly witty turn of phrase. ‘Is that so?’ Francie kept saying; he was having trouble keeping his eyes in focus, and when he tried to light a cigarette he fumbled and let the whole package spill on to the floor, and Gall laughed loudly. When Francie had got his smoke going he sat nodding to himself and gazing blearily at my knees.

  ‘Hobnobbing with the rozzers, eh?’ he said, and we all laughed at that, as if he had cracked a fine joke.

  The next moment, so it seemed, and to my large surprise, I found myself walking briskly if erratically up Rue Street, swinging my arms and breathing stertorously. The pavement was remarkably uneven and the flagstones had a tricky way of rising up at the corners just as I was about to step on them. I had no idea where I was going but I was going there with great determination. The sunlight glared and had an acid cast to it. At the corner of Ormond Street, near the spot where A. had fir
st spoken to me, there was parked a very large, old-fashioned American motor car of a pale mauve shade with tailfins and a stacked and complicated array of rear lights. As I approached, the driver’s door swung open and with a swift, balletic, corkscrew movement a heavy-set young man leaped lightly out and placed himself in my path. I halted, snorting and heaving.

  ‘The Da wants a word,’ he said.

  It took me a moment to recognise him as young Popeye, the one who had stood at the garden gate and glared at me the day Morden had taken me with him on that drive into the suburbs. There was something about him I seemed to know – I had seen it that other day, too – as if under the crustaceous accretion of rock-hard muscle there lurked a different, more delicate version of him, a ghostly Sweet Pea with whose form I was somehow familiar. Today he was dressed in an expensive, dark wool suit inside which despite his muscles he seemed lost, as if it were a hand-me-down from his big brother. Beads of sweat glittered in the nap of his close-cropped red hair. He bunched his fists and a nerve in his jaw danced.

  ‘Your father?’ I said with interest.

  He opened the rear door of the car smartly and jerked his head at me. I leaned down. Sitting in the back seat like a stone idol was the pasty-faced fellow who had come in his kilt and shawl to join young Popeye at the garden gate and watch us that day as we drove away. He was enveloped this time in a vast overcoat with a broad fur collar on which his big, pale, pointed head with its lardy jowls sat as if it had been placed there carefully and might tumble off at the slightest movement. Very small eyes, soft-boiled in their puckered sockets, swivelled and took me in and a hand emerged from the folds of the coat and offered itself to me.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he said; it was not a greeting but a question. I said I was getting on very well. His hand was soft and moist and cool; he shook mine slowly, solemnly, studying me the while. ‘I’m the Da,’ he said. ‘Do you not know me? I know you. Get in and we’ll have a chat.’