Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (7 page)

“Without doubt this smells funny.”

“It smells like a rat,” I said.

On this note of agreement and suspicion, I went to the studio, where I painted the carefully ruled roulette table a dark green enamel that hid the lines with one coat. Nan insisted on a meal, and then I went to work on my battered face. A base of foundation and enough eye shadow to soften the bruises, a good slather of lipstick. I’m partial to lipstick; there’s a particular scarlet that I find delectable, a color nearly impossible to reproduce on canvas. And thinking of canvases, I must admit to being tempted by the inspector, who seems to have increased in bulk, inflated by his new and frightening importance in my life. I’m taken with his brow ridge, his thick nose and thin lips, his subtly corrugated skin, the rounded, heavy shape of his face, a shape like my own. I would like to paint him in his interview room screaming, and perhaps I’ll get to see that if I’m not successful. Either way, a project best postponed for the moment, when I am to be charming and attractive—“All right, Nan? No smears, no flaws?”—and also subtly damaged and possibly damageable. Handsome helped me out on that.

“Good as can be under the circumstances,” said Nan.

My life’s motto. “Think of something to tell Arnold,” I said and felt guilty before the door had right closed. Arnold’s been good to us, and he’s genuinely fond of me, but the sooner I came up with something to satisfy the inspector the better, and Arnold’s presence would certainly be an impediment.

Given this ruthless and realistic frame of mind, you might expect that I went straight to work, asking questions, trying to locate Connie, comparing notes with other boys who consort with gentlemen. That’s what Handsome would have done, and if the inspector had wanted that, I suppose he’d have made different plans. I went out drinking, instead. I stopped at the Europa, where Maribelle—“I’d given you up, cunty!”—scolded me for my absence, and on to a little pub where I met a muscular Gordon Highlander, willing—for one of the Met’s guineas—to follow me to the park. Ah, the long English summer twilight, the majestic oaks and elms, and especially their shadows with damp grass and thrashing bodies. I was born for war and disruption, sensuality and disaster; they’ve been with me all my life: troubles in Ireland, the Great War, and now the prospect of death from the sky and other mortal novelties. I know how to survive, and, besides, we all need distractions while we wait for Herr Hitler.

I got to the Gargoyle late and well liquored, smelling of sex (that excellent aphrodisiac), and looking reckless. Out of the drizzly darkness and into the palace of art and decadence with its mirrored walls and Matisse murals. Yes, by the great man himself. Not my favorite, though his portraits are fetching and his colors priceless. I just don’t recognize his world: flowers and pattern and light and
bonheur.
I’m out to paint the rabbit hole full up to the top with violence and absurdity.

“Buy you a drink, darling?”

An angular face like the thin end of a spade, thick eyebrows, an unruly thatch of dyed red hair ill suited to his olive skin and shadowed cheeks. But duty before pleasure. “Music to my ears!”

To the bar, to glasses of prewar wine. He was in the theatre, did lighting and design; once in a great while he “assayed the boards.” Nothing impressed me until he began to speak of ancient drama, of the great Aeschylus, and I forgave even his hair. We agreed that
The Oresteia
is a great family drama and a profound political play. And on our favorite scenes, too: the arrival of King Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s account of the murder, the recognition of Orestes. It was, the red-haired man said, his dream to play Clytemnestra but—here he shrugged—the Greeks were not in demand and, in any case, the great days of the theatre ended the minute women stepped on the stage.

“Still,” I said, “there must be the occasional production or reading?”

“Yes, yes, but even there”—he leaned forward—“they prefer the feminine look.”

Between Aeschylus and decent wine, I was feeling giddy. “Well, the hair’s a start,” I said.

He frowned, then laughed—a big, braying laugh at odds with his mincing gait and languid gestures. “You’ll do, you’ll do!” He exclaimed, then he buried his nose in his glass and turned melancholy again before launching into his vision for staging
The Agamemnon
. Fascinating, really. First-rate ideas for the whole trilogy.

“Not to forget the Furies,” I said. “Who are with us always.”

His ideas about them involved some genuine Kabuki gestures that resembled something between the use of a nine iron and a flyswatter. “The Japanese theatre is so stylized, so eloquent.”

“I’ve always thought the Furies were the key to the whole thing. The mortal characters die and vanish, but the Furies remain.”

“Indeed,” he said, giving me a shrewd, sharp look. “Indeed, they do.” At the same time, I sensed he was not pleased that I had interrupted his explication, that I had ideas of my own. After several more minutes and a provocative, if salacious, idea for the presentation of Athena, he asked if I liked Brighton.

I regard Brighton with horror. The sea, for one thing—deep, wet, and monotonous—and the rows of terraces filled with holidaymakers and landladies. “Like a vision of the afterlife,” I said.

“Pity,” said my companion. “Money to be made in Brighton.” And without another word, he turned to the man on his left, blond and very inebriated, and began once again discussing the decline of the theatre and the thwarting of his life’s ambition to portray Clytemnestra. Right.

On several subsequent visits I kept my eyes and ears open and my glass topped up. Though I flirted with a variety of punters and wound up compromised in the gents with a few, I had little to report beyond a substantial bar bill. Oh, there were all manner of deviants—some far outside my tastes—and a good many pleasant chaps who wanted to buy me drinks and fondle my bum, so to speak, but I uncovered no dubious assignations or homicidal depravity.

The whole enterprise seemed pointless. For one thing the Gargoyle, despite its many enchantments, was
haut bohemia
and never the natural habitat of boys like Damien. For another, I felt guilty about Arnold, who’d been leaving me notes and messages that I’d ignored. One night, I turned around right at the door and set off for the gaming clubs. Luck was with me. Half an hour later, I was drifting down a curving stair overlooking the bright rafts of the roulette tables. There in the smoky gloom was Arnold, leaning over the board looking sad and hopeful. I went to stand behind him.

“Any luck tonight?”

He gave a start and turned. I saw a kind, wonderful smile that instantly soured. “I thought you’d found someone new.”

“In a manner of speaking. I’ve been going steady with the inspector.”

“You should have told me,” he said when we were out at the bar, and I’d given him a brief summary.

“They had the wheel.”

“Nan told me that.”

“She cleaned out the studio but—well, they more or less threatened all three of us with prosecution.”

“Dear boy!” He put his arm around my shoulders.

It seemed I was forgiven. From then on I started taking nights off to meet Arnold again at the gaming clubs, where we lost money and lamented the loss of our roulette wheel. Somehow the inspector got wind of these little excursions, and I was forced back into harness with a visit to The Pond. It had been off my list for some weeks, for, besides the fact that the inspector was convinced the trail led up the social ladder, I had hard feelings about being betrayed by my old drinking companions. But strolling back from Soho one fine Saturday afternoon, I passed the basement steps, heard music, and looked in. The smoke was permanent, the cloud in place though the bar was nearly empty. When I set my gas mask on the counter, the pale and wizened barman poured me a glass and expressed pleasure at my return.

I allowed it had been quite some time. “Under the circumstances, though—”

He nodded. “Still, you might have done it, you know.” He spoke with the enthusiasm that Nan reserves for capital punishment. “No, no, you can’t tell even with people you drink with of a night. You can’t blame the boys for being skittish.”

I took this under consideration. No doubt the story of how I had entered the lobby staggering and smeared with blood had undergone many elaborations and enlargements. But now I saw a way to turn this to my advantage. “Have you seen Connie about? I wanted a word and I keep missing him. In case, you know, he’d had any doubts about me, what with Damien being his best mate.”

The barman pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not been in for some time. He was off to Brighton, he told me.”

“Brighton?”

“Sort of a dirty weekend at the seashore.”

“Connie hardly needed to go as far as that. Whatever’s in Brighton?”

“Coastal defenses.”

“Oh, I suppose. Connie had a taste for uniforms. Still—”

“That’s what he said, anyway, and I haven’t seen him since.” He spoke abruptly, as though my questions had aroused some further doubt, and moved down the bar to top up a drink. Brighton, dreadful place; you can hear the surf rumbling through the shingle. I was almost home before I remembered the red-haired man at the Gargoyle.
Do you like Brighton?
I’d thought it an odd non sequitur at the time. And something else, bring it back from the sea of Chablis where so many ideas founder:
Pity, money to be made in Brighton.
Would I now be expected to venture to the coast, to indulge in some ghastly contact with the beach? I certainly hoped not. Just the same, obtaining the first piece of information was oddly exciting, and as I stepped into the phone box, I wondered if the inspector had felt the same little shiver when he saw the blood smears on the wall and found my discarded torch.

“Brighton,” said the inspector. A pause down the line as if he were thinking it over. Put into words, my discovery was an airy nothing, and waiting in the phone box, I expected heavy weather for wasting police time. Not so. “You don’t think it’s a club?” He asked finally.

“I don’t know. Could be either, could be both.”

“Find out before you go. No, no,” he responded to my protests of work, my ARP duties, Nan’s difficulties, “we’ll contact the Brighton police about Colin Williams, but you move in the right circles. If this theatrical chap is in Brighton, you’ll have to go. Give me his description again.”

I repeated the distinguishing characteristics of the redhead from the Gargoyle. Initially, the inspector had not been impressed, and I’d had the fleeting hope that other evidence had turned up to make me superfluous. But when I explained that the redhead’s favorite role, Clytemnestra, wielded a big knife, the inspector brightened up considerably. “Sniff around the artsy circles,” he said in conclusion. “Someone’s got to know. This is good work.”

Given my history, I get suspicious whenever some one tells me I’ve been a good boy, and this matter struck me as more dubious than most. I couldn’t imagine Damien in Greek theatrics, and I didn’t see “Clytemnestra” trading her big Mycenaen knife for some sort of bludgeon. Still, the inspector was pleased, and his approval would keep Nan and me out of jail.

The next morning, I knocked off work early to visit my old friend Roy, a barrel-chested Australian gifted with moderate talent and inordinate charm. When I returned to London after my continental adventures, he not only taught me the rudiments of oil painting but also introduced me to everyone I would need to know. For lines into what the inspector called “artsy circles,” Roy was the man. He worked near Victoria in a big studio cluttered with his bold, bright canvases and magpie collections and still furnished with a few elegant, if wretchedly uncomfortable, pieces I’d done back in my designer days. Lately he’d been working on portraits of both Arnold and me, providing a perfect excuse for an unannounced visit. When I arrived, Arnold’s portrait was leaning against the wall to dry, and, first thing, Roy wanted my opinion.

We stood studying the canvas, Roy in a characteristic pose with one hand on his massive head. He impresses one as a cheerful person, quite without shadows; his work strikes a darker note, both in the bold, intense colors and in what I can only call a subtle foreboding. He had Arnold to the life, but he’d caught a certain skepticism, at once worldly and wistful. This was not an expression I saw very often, but was one I now realized must be there. Though a hopeful gambler, Arnold was old enough to know the odds—in wagers and in life. It gave me a little turn to see that captured.

“It’s very good,” I said.

“You sound doubtful.”

“What does Burns say? ‘If we could see ourselves as others see us . . . ’ I think that goes double for one’s lovers. It’s good. Really.”

He smiled; he’d thought so too, but studio light is often deceiving. The work one loves turns out to be junk, while some little unconsidered piece, on further review, has possibilities. “And now for the pendant. You’ve come for a sitting?”

“Is that all right? I was at a standstill this morning and I thought—”

He made me welcome as always. We exchanged art-world gossip and tales of the blackout and the ARP while he got out the canvas, adjusted his palette, and checked my pose. I kept an eye on his rather high-toned colors, the cadmium reds and yellows, both raw and burnt sienna balanced with cold raw umber, and an array of vivid greens and blues, the intense colors of his continent. “You need to be looking straight ahead—that’s right. Excellent, excellent,” he said with a smile of anticipation; against all the odds, he finds my face inspiring.

“Face like a pudding,” I said, but Roy’s painted me before, and my studio, frequently. The most unlikely people and images can prove useful. I understand that.

While he worked, Roy chatted to keep me diverted. Now and again he frowned or puffed out his cheeks or stopped to stare intently at my features. I have a completely different approach. In between sittings I like to work on portraits from photographs, and I like to finish up with just the canvas and the image in my mind. When we took a little break I mentioned the red-haired Aeschylus fanatic I’d met in the Gargoyle. “I never got his name. Would you know him? A theater designer, I think.”