Francis Bacon in Your Blood (18 page)

George has been growing increasingly restive. I can hear his foot tapping next to mine under the table, and he is chain-smoking. Now that his champagne glass is empty and he's scooped the port out of his melon, leaving it otherwise untouched, he seems to have found nothing else to do but smoke. So far he has been following the conversation with a look of polite blankness, but now he's begun scowling at the haughty demeanour of the wine waiter who has begun his round, dispensing a minute quantity of the decanted Bordeaux into Zette's and then Michel's glass. As the sommelier comes closer, bearing the wine like a chalice before him, George gives a loudly dismissive snort and wrests the decanter from the alarmed waiter, filling his glass and mine, then leaning over to fill the others' to the brim.

As George pours the last drops into Francis's glass, the wine waiter recoils in horror, saying: ‘But, Monsieur, those are the dregs.'

‘But I love the dregs,' says Francis, beaming up at him. ‘The
dregs
are what I prefer.'

Everyone at the table starts laughing. Even George is smiling. Another bottle of the same has been ordered. The conversation quickens. The gilt-framed mirrors glow with reflected light. Life has suddenly become more amusing.

‘Where the bloody hell is Michael?' Garith comes out of his office shouting.

‘He's at home doing background research for the interview he'll be doing in Rome with Balthus,' David replies.

‘Doing research on his own bloody navel, I should think,' Garith roars. ‘Just because he's got some poofter painter in town he goes flapping around getting bloody plastered with, he thinks he doesn't have to turn up at the office. I'm trying to run an international magazine here, David, not some bloody whorehouse for pisspots and nancy boys.'

He slams his door shut, only to open it a moment later.

‘I'm trying to run a tight ship here, not some playground for pansies,' Garith shouts in an aggrieved voice. ‘And all I get is subterfuge and evasiveness. Subterfuge and evasiveness,' he repeats, clearly relishing the portentous sound of the words.

‘If you think an article as central to the February issue as a rare interview with the reclusive maestro of the Villa Medici is not worth a morning's research,' David replies icily, ‘then I suggest you give up any pretensions about making the magazine more than a pale, awkward English-language version of French
Réalités
and fire the lot of us.'

It is first-class David. Even Garith realizes that. He goes back into his office, then reappears immediately afterwards. He has his hat still on but his jacket off and his braces flapping around his thighs.

‘Got such a head this morning myself,' he concedes. ‘Wouldn't have one of your fizzy pills, would you, old boy?'

David has just given me this latest update over the phone. It's true I was out on a massive bender with Francis last night that went from drinks at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, where he's staying, to champagne and oysters at the Dôme, then later pigs' trotters and Burgundy in the fin-de-siècle splendour of Bofinger (I'm beginning to sound like one of the ‘Around Paris' pieces I write for
Réalités
) and on through several bars round the Bastille. Francis constantly amazes me by the ease with which he seems to walk through walls into completely different spaces and situations. At one point in the early hours it looked as if everything had closed and then he lurched round a corner off the rue de la Roquette and there was a dingy Arab café with
its lights still on. I didn't like the look of it, or of the tough-looking men listening to a guttural, broken song coming from a transistor radio.

‘Well, this is my life,' Francis said, as we drank cognac from a sticky bottle hidden at the back of the counter. ‘From bar to bar, person to person.'

‘Are you sure you want to stay, Francis?' I asked timidly. One of the men had started swaying his hips to the music and was grinning over at us. His front teeth were silver-coloured and caught the dim overhead light.

‘I do want to stay,' Francis said very clearly. ‘After all, I might just meet someone I could talk to,' he added archly, smiling back at the grim-faced men.

I wasn't so drunk that I didn't realize it was time for me to bow out. We seemed to have come a long way from the first glittering glasses of champagne to these dregs of the night. But then, I thought as I began walking back to my bed-sit and stopped on the Pont des Arts to watch dawn creep up over the Seine, that's exactly what Francis wanted: the dregs.

I've had enough of the dregs to last me for a while, which was why I called David to say I'd be working on my Balthus piece at home today. It's very nice to have an ally like him in the office. If I feel so exhausted and bilious this morning, I just wonder how Francis can be facing up to another day. Did he go on drinking that very iffy brandy? Worse still, did he get beaten up and robbed? I've noticed once or twice he's had difficulty walking or turning his head. I asked him once if he'd twisted something and he told me he'd slipped on the bathroom floor, but so tersely that I decided not to ask again. What could he see in those brutal-looking men? I thought back to the distorted, cream-and-pink bodies thrashing together in his pictures and felt sicker still. Each to his own, I say out aloud to my anonymous little room, and I go back to studying Balthus's gracefully suggestive adolescent girls.

‘Would Francis have got any sleep at all?' I wonder, a few long silent seconds later. It's a very big moment for him. He's
got his opening tonight. If it had been me, I'd have probably been tucked up before midnight. He'll be dealing with the first press interviews right now, then he'll have to go to lunch with the gallery people and perhaps some collectors, then there'll be more interviews right the way through until the
vernissage
starts. If he's lucky, there'll be time for a hot bath and a change into a freshly pressed suit. That'll be the only luxury before more hard living through one more night. How does he do it? He's more than thirty years older than me, and I'm not exactly a slouch when it comes to burning the candle at both ends. But I'm tired and liverish even before I've begun. The idea of more drink and rich food, to say nothing of the strain of finding the right thing to say to an endless variety of people, makes me dizzy with fatigue just thinking about it.

But there's no point in going around with Francis if you can't stay the pace. However much you've drunk with him the night before, there's never any question of drinking more sensibly the day after. It's almost like a discipline, or a duty, with him. Where other people feel they should cut back and give their liver a rest, Francis seems to think that the only solution is continued, relentless excess. Back in London once, when I'd turned up green to the gills from the previous evening for a lunch with him at Claridge's, I left my glass of wine deliberately untouched, until Francis noticed it and topped it up twice until it started overflowing. I knew he was watching me now like a hawk, but I stuck to my resolution to drink only water, even if the wine he had ordered was a particularly fine, expensive Pauillac to go with our rack of lamb. After a moment, Francis summoned the wine waiter and said, ‘My friend doesn't like this wine. Could you bring the list so that we can see if we can possibly find something he prefers.' And of course that was the end of it. I simply gave in and drank the newly chosen, priceless vintage and then whatever else was on offer until the hair of the dog really did work, at least until the next morning after.

Francis appears to have some magic knack for dealing with alcohol, almost as if his compact frame contained a spare pipe he could open at will to drain off the gallons of drink that have piled up in his system. I've left him sometimes in mid-afternoon barely able to stand, only to find him the same evening in a collector's apartment looking pink and fresh, complimenting the lady of the house on her exquisite taste (although on one occasion he was furious to find artificial flowers in an expensively decorated Parisian salon, and he hissed quietly to me, ‘Why can't she have
real
flowers? The whole point of flowers is that they
die
').

So I'm not too surprised to find Francis alert and bright-eyed this evening, oozing energy and suavity in equal measure as he works his way round the throng at the Galerie Maeght. He knows he can ask a great deal of himself, and perhaps it's his gambler's instinct that makes him booze all night and consort with Algerian toughs just before a key event in his career. I know how much he's pinned on this, working flat out not only to get the right body of work together, but to secure the right space – he foresaw how Maeght's double-cube room would show off his pictures in a grand yet approachable, intimate way. He's also pulled off the coup of having a major French literary figure – Michel – present his work in the catalogue; and it's not by chance, moreover, that his show has been timed to coincide with the big Picasso retrospective at the Grand Palais. And now, having just been roughed up and God knows what else in an alleyway behind the Bastille, he's being all things to all men, and women as well: I've noticed a couple of elegant Parisiennes first recoil in alarm from the paintings and then melt with pleasure as they are presented to the affable
artiste
. I've gone over to greet Sonia, who's come to Paris especially for the opening, but she's deep in conversation with a diminutive lady with large glasses and only pauses to look at me meaningfully and say ‘As I expect you know, this is Marguerite Duras,' a name that's vaguely familiar to me as someone who writes abstruse, ‘new wave' novels.

I also say hallo to Jacques Dupin, a poet whose work, although also abstruse, I admire for the sheer evocative power of its language. He looks after all the major artists at Galerie Maeght and he was very close to Giacometti. Last time I had dinner with him and Francis, he told us he was trying to start up a magazine with some other poets called
L'Ephémère
, and they were going to devote the whole of their first issue to Giacometti. I thought that was a fantastic idea, although if it comes out it will probably be so hermetically written in that particular French way that I won't have much idea what's going on. I haven't got much idea what's going on this evening, either, except that there's a lot of expensively dressed, perfumed people chatting to each other and barely taking in the hotly coloured atrocities bottled up under glass in the gilt frames running round the room. There's no one else I really know, apart from one of Francis's irritating hangers-on, who invariably asks me, whenever I bump into him going round the galleries, how ‘our' friend is doing, without even bothering to ask how I am.

Francis, on the other hand, seems to know everyone. He's talking to a couple of French art critics now with disarming phrases I've heard before, such as ‘I really don't know myself where these images come from, they just sort of coalesce on the canvas,' and ‘Painting has had so many possibilities cancelled out for itself by photography that it's more and more a question of trying to deepen the game through instinct and chance.'

I wonder what the critics scribbling down these gnomic statements will make of them when they're sitting over their typewriters trying to hammer out a review of the exhibition. They won't have much to go on because Michel's preface, which they're bound to take as gospel and quote widely, is pretty gnomic too. So they're going to have to deal with the paintings head on, and they'll find that a real problem because outside the earlier, overt references to Picasso (whose vast retrospective they will also be reviewing at far greater length) there are next to no references for them to follow up on. A hint
of Surrealism in the nightmarishly suffocating pictorial space, perhaps, a touch of Abstract Expressionism in the horizontal bands of background colour, but not much else. The
angoisse
of contemporary man, that should do for a paragraph or two, and perhaps a few words about distortion of form and chromatic clash. But basically Francis is simply not known here. He's not that fantastically well known back home, at least compared to someone like Picasso, but there have been regular gallery shows and a full-scale retrospective. In Paris, he had just one small gallery show about ten years ago and the odd inclusion in group exhibitions. So the critics are going to be up against it, I think, and just then, as Francis goes into a huddle with the sleek, extravagantly coiffed Monsieur Maeght, I spot George, buttonholed by one of the critics and looking desperate. I catch his eye and go over.

‘You are the subject of so many of these paintings,' the critic is saying in English.

‘Yeh. Spose I am,' says George, guardedly. ‘'Oo wants to know?'

‘And how do you react to this attack, this visceral attack on your person and personality?' the critic asks.

‘I dunno,' says George, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. ‘I wouldn't know, would I?'

The critic presses a button on his bulky tape recorder, which clearly alarms George.

‘So how can you psychologically withstand such an assault?' the critic asks. ‘It menaces your very existence, isn't it?'

George blinks, then squares his shoulders, as if preparing for a fight.

‘Why don't you fuckin' ask 'im?' he says eventually, jerking his thumb over towards Bacon. ‘Ask 'im. 'E fuckin' did 'em, din't 'e?'

‘I'm sure Monsieur Bacon can explain the paintings more satisfactorily than his friend Monsieur Dyer,' I intercede formally.

The critic retires and merges back into the circle round Bacon, whom Maeght is introducing to someone with an authoritarian mien and even more tics than Michel who I think must be André Malraux.

‘I fink they're fuckin' 'orrible,' George says, snorting with what sounds like pride. ‘Reely fuckin' orful. An 'e's getting all that money for 'em.'