Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (8 page)

“Very thin, hawkish face?”

“That’s right.”

“A bit of an old queen?”

“Did you know these are Kabuki gestures?” I flounced around the room and made him laugh.

“That’s him. His name’s Aubrey Teck. I’m surprised he didn’t ask you to join the group.”

“I fell from favor by disliking Brighton.”

“It is very prudent to dislike Brighton, though I personally like the piers and the Royal Pavilion. Haven’t you ever seen that? Oh, Francis, really! It’s Moorish fantasy— an opium dream without a pipe. All shut up now, I should think, for the duration.”

“But what was this group?”

“I think it was the Brighton Group, the Brighton Club, Brighton Drama, something along those lines. He’s always on the lookout for likely boys for fun and games. I couldn’t imagine how he was getting them with that dreadful hair, but drama, I suppose, that is something different.”

“He longs to play Clytemnestra; he sees a great career ruined by the advent of actresses.”

“I shouldn’t doubt,” Roy said, and laughed.

“A harmless enough ambition, I reckon.”

“Daft, simply daft, darling. High drama in sheets with gestures.” He waved his arms in the air. Despite, or perhaps because of, a proper education, Roy is not as taken with the Greeks as I am.

“Where did this group meet, do you know?” I tried for casual; with all his contacts and acquaintances, Roy functions like an artistic town crier, but his antenna detected my more than passing interest.

“Don’t tell me you have theatrical leanings. Oh, dear, squelch that; it’s painter’s ruin.”

“Not me. A friend of a friend is desperately keen on Greek tragedy,” I said, though I doubted the inspector would agree with any part of that description. “When he heard about Teck, he wanted me to check him out.”

“Well, your friend will have to head to Brighton. Of course, my dear. Why else would it be called the Brighton Club or whatever it is? It’s definitely Brighton Something.” Roy had what I think of as an antipodean laugh, coming from somewhere in his capacious belly and utterly infectious. After a certain amount of banter, I had not an address but tips on a few likely pubs and a general idea of Aubrey Teck’s Brighton habitat.

I might have gone straight to the inspector with this gen. Like that? More military slang: “general intelligence”; Liam keeps us up to date on all the latest. Except this intelligence was hardly general, and I was leery of handing over even Aubrey Teck to the inspector on such slender grounds. No. What I did was invent another asthma episode for the ARP post and got Arnold to run down to Brighton with me.

I told him I was convinced there was nothing, nothing at all, in the business and no reason to put Teck in the way of the police. At the same time, a journey on the crowded trains to Brighton and an effort to locate the Brighton Something-or-Other of Wild Boys and Greek Drama would be a serious effort, maybe enough for the inspector to move on to other prey. I was joking when I said that, but many a true word is spoken in jest. There was something predatory about my personal cop, who more and more struck me as a man of two sides, neither of which was in good contact with the other. My importance lay in the fact that I was in touch with both the man who picked up boys in the park and the copper who arrested them. It behooved me to be careful.

“Come see this, dear boy.”

I stretched my arms and got up from the big carved bed with its creamy, luxurious sheets and fat down pillows—shades of Berlin and Uncle Lastings—and went to where Arnold was standing at the tall hotel window. The sky was dark and rather stormy to the east, fading red and gold to the west: spectacular Turner effects, now too impossibly beautiful for a serious painter. One of the little tragedies of modern life is that scenic beauty has become problematic, and the Brighton sky was nothing if not scenic. Down below was another matter. The hotel overlooked the pebbled seafront now strewn with rolls of barbed wire and studded with cubes of concrete as protection against landing tanks. Vaulting over both, the piers strode far into the sea on their long spider legs, their bulbous pleasure domes gradually darkening as the blackout commenced. We could hear the sound of pebbles rolling and rattling in the surf.

Arnold draped one arm across my naked shoulders and recited,
“The sea is calm to
-
night. The tide is full
.
The moon lies fair upon the straits . . . ”
He is fond of poetry. “You don’t know ‘Dover Beach’?”

I didn’t know “Dover Beach.”

“Apt, maybe too apt:
Listen! You hear the grating roar
o
f pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling . . . . With tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles is in it too. Though not Aeschylus, our present interest.”

He recited the rest, though the only lines I can remember are:
“Ah, love let us be true to one another”
—perhaps Arnold’s hope for me—and the ending: “
And we are here as on a darkling plain
.
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”

As Arnold said, too apt.

“Of course, he wasn’t thinking of invasion, but of the decline of Christianity, of faith in general.”

I leaned my head on his shoulder and listened to his ideas about the poet. Arnold regrets my neglected education and is keen that I should be knowledgeable, that I should miss nothing, that I should be complete intellectually. If my father had spent half—even a quarter—as much time on me as Arnold has, I’d be a better man by far, perhaps one capable of fidelity and other impossible virtues.

But this was not, as I know the inspector would agree, a time for virtue! A drink or two with Arnold, a little paint, a little powder, a little Kiwi polish in my hair—I like to go dark for night—white shirt, black trousers, black leather jacket.

“Don’t tangle with the gangs,” warned Arnold, who feared the notorious Brighton toughs who prowl beneath the piers at night and fight with razors and bicycle chains, pastimes I regard as both exciting and ridiculous.

A few kisses for Arnold, who was off to see a friend in Hove, before we went down to the lobby, bright with lights and gilt, and out to the darkening streets. This is a time I like. The sky is still light enough to silhouette the buildings and distinguish people on the pavements, but details are lost in shadow, and I can feel the shyness and regrets of my life begin to dissolve in darkness and in alcohol. To the pubs, then! To drink with nerved-up airmen and sailors and violent, thin-faced men of no certain occupation, possibilities on every side! Alas, tonight I have a special quarry. One pub, two: a fine mix of bored men, painted women, and ambidextrous boys, but no Clytemnestra and no Connie, my second target, either. Dancing with a Polish airman, blind drunk, who did the complicated figures of some ancient Slavic dance. Discussing Monet with a bearded Scotsman who nursed a whiskey as if it were the water of life and had heated opinions on the Impressionists in general, Monet in particular. “He should never have left off figure painting. Never.”

An interesting idea. One I’m willing to entertain.

And now, my mind in an interesting place after four pubs and assorted libations (a good Greek word for a night seeking Greeks), streets dark with touches of deepest purple and brown, a drizzle rain beginning, the sea whispering in my ear like all the bad ideas of my life, I enter—where am I entering?—the Hound? The Greyhound? Some dog anyway, a bad omen; dogs are the bane of my life, seizer of my lungs, hounds of hell. Through the curtain, lights, smoke, laughter, smell of perfume, painted faces, falsetto voices, promising, promising. A drink. Chablis, real if sadly watered; still, a good omen, and the gods suddenly turned favorable, for as I am chatting to a muscular chap in black leather pants finished with a bicycle-chain belt, I hear someone say, “Disaster, total disaster. The production’s a total and complete loss. And darling, I was so ready!
At once, at once let his way be strewn with purple, that Justice lead him toward his unexpected home.
”

It could only be Clytemnestra. I patted my companion’s arm and slid away through the mix of khaki and pastel frocks and leather. I saw the vivid red hair above the hawk face. Aubrey Teck was heavily made up and wearing a dark-feathered tiara with an ordinary lounge suit.
“The rest a mind, not overcome by sleep, will arrange rightly, with God’s help as destined,”
he declaimed.

That is the end of Clytemnestra’s welcome speech to her husband, and, stepping behind him, I replied,
“I tell you to honor me as a man, not god. Footcloths are very well; embroidered stuffs are stuff for gossip. And not to think unwisely is the greatest gift of God. Call happy only him who has ended his life in sweet prosperity.”

“Darling!” shrieked Teck. “Come with me!”

I don’t think he remembered me from the Gargoyle; his eyes were very black and dilated. The inspector, no doubt, would have labeled him “in a fine state,” but now that Teck had a likely Agamemnon, one, moreover, who knew at least the famous lines, he was flying high. He had what he called his little pied-à-terre, a flat in a big terrace not far from the pub; “a quiet neighborhood,” he assured me. He mentioned the tranquility of the area twice, although I was uncertain that was a recommendation. I found Aubrey Teck deeply unattractive, but the dark streets, his urgent hand on my arm, the silhouette of his feathered headdress produced a certain frisson, accentuated when we arrived at a massive, neglected-looking terrace. The heavy door creaked open on a dark foyer with a shiny black-tile floor and a hint of bad plumbing. An unseen kitchen was at the back, bedroom probably to the left. On the right was a large, dimly lit lounge painted a deep maroon with what my ARP-trained eye noted were first-rate blackout curtains and shutters. It was sparely furnished with a fireplace equipped with candles, and, below the single bare ceiling bulb, a claw-footed bathtub with dubious stains. An unlit standing lamp in the shape of a brazier cast a properly archaic shadow on a long runner of purple carpeting—the footcloths of Agamemnon, no doubt—and, hiding what looked to be the sole chair, big swaths of red and buff drapery. Voilà: the never-before-glimpsed interior of the palace of the House of Atreus. Clearly this would be an unconventional production.

Aubrey indicated an antique breastplate and a length of unbleached linen. “Clytemnestra requires a little more,” he said. “I’ll sneaky-weaky off to change. There’s some wine.”

Sure enough there was a bottle of sherry, heavy with sediment, on the mantel and a pair of strange cups like martini glasses that had been half melted and flattened. I took a good swig before checking the tub, which had, I noticed, a drain pipe and a water supply, though a big ceramic pitcher stood beside it on the floor as backup. Nice enough for a bath before the fire, though hardly reassuring for Agamemnon, given that Clytemnestra kills him in his tub. Another swig of sherry—it really was dreadful stuff and possibly adulterated. Detecting an unfamiliar aftertaste, I spat into the fireplace.

But, as Nan likes to say, in for a penny, in for a pound. I took off my leather jacket, discarded my clothes. The heap of linen resolved itself into a kilt and an oblong cape with a big round fastening pin. Kilt first, short enough to expose tender parts to the breeze. Breastplate next, light and mercifully nonmetallic, as there was a distinct chill in the room where fire, and even the past summer’s warmth, were only distant memories. Papier-mâché with handy elastic straps, the breastplate was clearly some theatrical prop. The cape next. Over one shoulder, fasten with the big archaic pin. On the back wall, light wavered in a full-length mirror, and there I was, despite the pudding face and a tad too much lipstick: King Agamemnon, loyal brother, great warrior, bad husband, worse father.

“Come to the door.”

I turned. Aubrey was standing in the doorway wearing a full-length gown of some purple stuff trimmed with gold. He was adorned with several large necklaces and the dark-feathered headdress that to me was more Queen of the Night than Mycenaean. I walked to the hall. He held up his hand, pointing to a spot at the edge of the purple runner. When I was correctly positioned, he swirled his gown and with one imperious gesture, became Queen Clytemnestra.

“But it is the conqueror’s part to yield upon occasion.”

“You think such victory is worth fighting for?”
Was that the line?

“Give way. Consent to let me have the mastery.”

“As I step on these sea-purples may no god shoot me from afar with the envy of his eye.”
I couldn’t remember the rest, but I saw it did not matter. Clytemnestra was deep in the moment, her eyes fathomless, her motions ritualistic, perhaps drugged. I wasn’t feeling too steady myself. Down the carpet toward the fatal bath while my homicidal queen declaimed to the imagined audience in the foyer.

“ . . . if only its master walk at home, a grown man, ripe.

O Zeus, the Ripener, ripen these my prayers;

your part it is to make the ripe fruit fall.”

The whisper of sandals on the rug. We were obviously dispensing with Cassandra and the chorus of nervous and ineffectual elders. Clytemnestra stalked in and turned on the tap to fill the water pitcher. With many gestures, some doubtless inspired by the Kabuki theatre, she motioned for me to undress for the Returning Hero’s Ritual Bath, or RHRB in our modern, military-inflected terminology. I hoped Aubrey had remembered to put some coins in the water heater.

Off with the cape. Off, with the queen’s assistance, the breastplate. I suspect the real Clytemnestra got on with things a bit faster than Aubrey, who seemed keen to explore my anatomy. No matter, the farcical, the erotic, and the sinister were now so intermingled that my head was spinning. Into the tub, cold on the bottom, in both senses. Water poured, lukewarm—might have been worse—then, suddenly, something rough and stringy over my head and arms, a net. Instinctively, I threw up one arm and tried to stand but I was struck in the middle of the back. I gave a cry, more surprised than hurt, Agamemnon’s lines forgotten. “Let me up!” I yelled as I tried to get my feet under me. Clytemnestra shrieked in response and a second blow knocked me back so that I slipped on the wet porcelain and struck my head on a tap. I had time to hear Clytemnestra breathing hard and to feel something wet and sharp against my chest before a woozy blackness obliterated the sense that I’d made a dreadful mistake.