SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (20 page)

'Something for you to remember her by. I'm still not sure I can see a film here. Are we talking about a thirty-minute number?'

'Don't know yet. Depends how far it all goes. Can you make the camera forget?'

'Forget what?'

'Everything. Is there some way of using filters or masks or something that lets us understand that the lens is starting to remember?'

L
ens remembers nothing, Owen.' And yet, as so often working with him, John Tamworth had at that moment seen a very interesting problem laid before him. Because of the way Owen did everything in words, these problems often seemed bizarre, even impossible, when they were first formulated. But then they often turned into something.

'You know what I
mean,
J
ohn
. I can tell by that expression of yours, you know exactly what I mean. You always shake your head like that and say it's impossible when I give you something really interesting, like the cameraman on
Citizen Kane.
"Can't be done, Mr Welles; you can't shoot from that angle." We usually end up doing it, all the same, don't we? The lens has your memory - the way you point it and move it and choose focal lengths. I want you to think about using a lens as though you've never used on
e before, as though no one had
ever used one before. Trying to find its depth of field, going in and out of focus. Moving in too close, going out too far. As though it was trying out the world for the first time, the way a man with anterograde amnesia has to find out where everything in the world is again. I'm telling you, with the right voice-over, it could be magical.'

And for the first time since all this had come up, John Tamworth began to believe that another film might have just got started between them.

It didn't make him like Owen Treadle any better.

Mirada Fuerte

With Owen inside it, the house had felt too small, much too small. Now it suddenly seemed very big. All those empty rooms. Not even a cat to prowl around, knocking things over. Should she phone Henry? The truth was that she would have liked to go and see Henry, right now. This particular evening she badly needed someone's company. Henry's gentle voice, gentle humour, nice wine, would all have been perfect. Why had she not simply let the relationship meander on? What harm would there have been in that, for either of them? But he wanted more than that, didn't he? And it wasn't fair to let him think there might be more than that, because there never would be. Some things couldn't be altered in life. She walked into the bathroom and stared at her face in the mirror. What a look of perplexity you seem to be rehearsing these days, Miss Ashton. Has Little Missey gone astray? No one to blame but yourself then, you old tart. She had tried to phone Tom Helsey four times and been connected to his answering machine on each occasion. Was that really his routine? A quick fuck and then fuck off? Was Alison right? She certainly seemed pretty confident about her facts. And can I really be so stupid at my age, to fall for that one? On the other hand, I was drunk. Talk about clutching at straws. Do some work, woman. Earn your keep. One last look in the mirror. Not bad, actually. All the anxiety had made her a fraction leaner.

Back to Picasso then. He so o
ften turned his laughing women
into weeping women. Francoise Gilot put it thus: first you were the plinth, then the doormat. Women were either in the sky or on the floor.
A woman weeps and the air about her fractures.
She weeps and the tears turn into icicles or knives. She weeps and the room about her screams a vivid lament. Behind her a rainbow turns hysterical and spews out its colours. Van Gogh yellows bleed from the furniture.
Soutine reds striate her face.
A woman weeps until even her flesh is nothing but a serration of jagged edges. A shapely torso has turned overnight into a broken bottle.
If
you want to drink from it, it'll most likely be blood you'll be swallowing. 50 were these images a celebration of oppression or its truthful exposition? Could they have simply been a lament for the tragedies life affords? The tears had long ago dried, the salt stains vanished, but the paintings remain. Art, Lionel, lasts a lot longer than sex, but it's not always any less messy.

She turned and looked at the picture on her study wall.

Always in all the photographs of him it is Picasso's eyes that dominate; they are lode
stars
–
lode
stones too, since they magnetised so many. Dark powers that led women to their salvation or doom, or often enough to both at the same time.
Mirada
F
uerte,
the strong gaze, devouring what it confronts.
It exercised power over whatever came within its focus. Picasso was pursuing beauty all right but it had taken on different features, at times even becoming what we once called ugly. When Picasso showed him
Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,
even his close friend Braque said it was like drinking paraffin. Someone else said he'd end up hanged by the neck behind it. 50 he rolled it up and threw it underneath his bed, where it stayed for years, unknown and unlamented.

Sylvie looked at the photograph of Picasso on her wall and the photograph of Picasso looked back, the black pools of his eyes wide and deep enough, it seemed
, to swallow a herd of thirsty
elephants. So many memories down in the water: What was Henry's constant nightmare? The whole of the Renaissance drowned in the flood. The only eyes she knew anywhere near as dark as that were Owen's
.

She left the room and went downstairs to the telephone.

John answered.

'Is everything all right?'

'I suppose so. Will he be coming back to you when it's all over?'

'Don't think so, Johnny. Not this time. Not after ... well, you know. I was thinking of coming over your way to that little Italian place. Fancy a bite? Just the three of us? Be like old times.'

'Let me ask Owen.' She could hear a brief conversation, then he was back. 'That's fine. Say half an hour?'

*

They sat together at the table in silence for a few minutes, then Owen started laughing. Owen had a winning laugh; it swooped, levitated, settled on unexpected objects. John joined in, and then Sylvie.

'Why are we laughing?' she said finally. 'Why not?'

The waiter came over to the laughing table. 'Can I take your order?'

'I know what I want,' Owen said. 'Pasta penne. '

'I'll have the Bolognese,
’
John said.

'Can I ask what's in the vegeta
rian pizza?' Sylvie asked. The
waiter shrugged. 'Lots of vegetables.'

'Fair enough. I'll have that then.'

'White wine or red?'

'I'll stick with water tonight,' Sylvie said.

'Red all right, Owen? We'll have a carafe of the red.'

'How's your mother, by the way?' John asked and Owen smiled.

'You're so good at pleasantries, John.' Why did Owen look so attractive tonight? Was it because he was on his way out of her life, or was it that his new-found freedom had lit him up? His
mirada fuerte
was blazing. Wouldn't have too much trouble picking up some young piece around Chester; but then he never did have much trouble, did he?

'She's not too bad, thanks, John. Still studying her Krishnamurti, trying to make the many one.'

'Who isn't?' Owen asked.

'I don't think I am,' John said. 'I think I prefer the one to be many. Like George Oppen I believe in the shipwreck of the singular.'

'You met him once, didn't you? Krishnamurti.'

'Yes. I think I must have been about sixteen. There was some huge marquee, I remember that, and all these crowds of hushed and excited people wandering about. We managed to get a seat up near the dais. And after what seemed hours the little man came out, dressed like a landowner from the pages of
Country Life,
in a nicely-cut tweed jacket and cavalry twills. He spoke for so long I finally dozed off. I remember a lot of phrases like "Not to be in love with something but simply to be in love, in the state of it." But for as long as I was awake I couldn't take my eyes off his hair.

As
she drove me back later my mother seemed torn between her new state of spiritual elevation, and her disgruntlement with her feckless daughter. "You fell asleep," she said. "How could you do that?" "Because I was tired," I said. "You can get tired any time. It's not every day you get to see Krishnamurti. See him, be in his presence, listen to his wisdom." "So why does he do that with his hair then, if he's so wise?" "What?" "Come on, mother, don't tell me you didn't notice. He kept going on about there being no secrets that can be kept from the questing spirit, so why does he go to all that trouble to comb his white hair over his bald patch? You can see it from a mile away; you don't have to be on the astral plane. So why's he so desperate to keep that a secret then?"

'My mother never quite forgave me for that. If it had been me in the burning building and Krishnamurti, she'd definitely have saved him and left me for cinders. Left me to find a spiritual purging in the flames. Not like your mother, eh Owen?'

'No, with mine it was Jesus all the way.'

'So she went round forgiving people all the time, did she?'

'On the contrary, she thought the forgiveness side of things in Christianity had been seriously over-promoted. She was keen to emphasize the other side of
Jesus
: maledictions on fig trees, booting money-lenders out of the temple. Get thee behind me, Satan.

Actually, to be fair, there were only two things my mother absolutely couldn't stand: unpunctuality and sinners. But then since nobody is always exactly on time, and only Jesus and his mother lived a life entirely without sin, what this actually amounted to was that my mother never liked anyone much. Not for long anyway. She certainly never liked me. Every so often she might tilt a little towards one endearing soul or another, but soon enough he'd turn up five minutes late, or be spotted talking to a member of the opposite sex in an unregulated zone, and that would be his name erased for ever from the book of life. Found it hard now to fathom what she'd ever seen in him in the first place. A man so slovenly he couldn't even set his watch; a fornicator soliciting strangers he encountered at the kerbside. Another foot- soldier in the devil' s army, desperate and woe-begone. "We'
LL
still be keeping him as our doctor though, won't we, Mum?" I'd ask, desperate for a bit of continuity. "We'll keep him as our doctor for the moment, until a more spiritually salubrious practitioner turns up.'"

'Why was she like that?' John always had to find the reason behind things; he never believed anything could be arbitrary.

'My Dad, I suppose. The old man had a fish and chip shop in Swansea. He also had a penis that never stayed zippered for more than ten hours at a time. Took a couple of years after they were married before Mum realised what had been going on.
It
was one night when he'd taken the dog for a walk. Used to go down around the graveyard. Mum didn't like it down there. Thought it was creepy. That's probably why he went. Very long walks, that dog used to get. Anyway the dog came back this time, minus Dad. So Mum went off on a search for once. Went to the pub, obvious first port-of-call, but he wasn't there. Finally galvanized herself to go down to the graveyard, and spotted Dad, up against one of the larger catacombs, having a knee-trembler with a local floozie. That's when she took to the Gospel in earnest.'

'You never told me that, Owen.'

'Didn't I? Probably thought you were too young in those days.'

'I've aged, obviously.' So are you a chip off the old block, my husband? Is it no more than the inescapability of genetics? Or was that the choice you thought life had presented you with, Bible-thumping or fornication? Why had he never told her about his father? She'd even met the old fellow. Was he still at it, down in Swansea? Or had he finally achieved a state of senile detumescence?