Angelica's Grotto (20 page)

‘As a friend to whom?’

‘He probably meant me; he’s given to innuendo.’

‘Do you think about death much?’

‘Well, I’m seventy-two and not in good health; I’m surprised that I’ve lived this long – I never expected to. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in hospital and I don’t want to die with all kinds of tubes coming into and out of me. It’s the final landfall and I’d like to fetch a good one, maybe die in the middle of a really classy paragraph or a wholly improper act. But not in hospital.’

‘I can understand that. What else has Oannes said?’

‘“Wild thing.” We were talking about my Schulzian
tendencies. He was taking the piss of course; he doesn’t let me get away with much.’

‘You and I haven’t talked about your Schulzian tendencies–today is the first time you’ve mentioned them.’

‘Oannes made that remark after I asked myself or him whether there was in all men a secret desire to abase themselves at the feet of a woman who has contempt for them. I was wondering whether I was naturally depraved and losing control of myself. That’s when he said, “Wild thing.”’

‘Had you abased yourself at Melissa’s feet?’

‘Here we go, spelling out every fucking thing. When did you first begin to do your living vicariously?’

‘What makes you think self-abasement is my idea of living?’

‘Sorry, Leon – I was forgetting my place. Yes, I abased myself at Melissa’s feet. Do you want her shoe size?’

‘No, my question is, do you think you’re naturally depraved?’

‘I was wondering about that at the time but not now. I don’t think I’m depraved and I do think there are all kinds of urges in everybody but

‘But?’

‘It’s not as good as navigating by the stars without instruments. It’s not as good as being a real man.’

‘Where’s all this navigation coming from?’

Klein told him about
The Last Navigator.

‘You have to remember,’ said Dr DeVere, ‘that Piailug’s life is simpler than yours. When was the film made?’

‘About ten years ago, I think.’

‘Who knows how things are with him now? Even back then the kids didn’t want his teaching any more and there was a steamer going round the islands like a bus. Maybe
he doesn’t feel much of a man now either. Feeling like a man depends on quite a complex system of inner and outer psyche-shapers. A society like Piailug’s had reasonably foolproof systems for a long time but not any more. Our urban society puts the burden of psyche-shaping pretty much on the individual and everybody has to work out his own system which makes everything more difficult.’

‘You’re such a comfort to me, Leon.’

‘Once in a while at least. What’s your next Oannes quote?’

‘“I’m only happy when it’s complicated.” That’s the second line of the song. The first is, “I’m only happy when it rains.” Shirley Manson sings it; the name of the group and the album is Garbage.’

‘When did Oannes come up with that line?’

‘Melissa was spanking me at the time.’

‘I have to tell you, Harold, you’re really good value as a patient. With you there’s always something new to keep me on my toes.’

‘I do my best, Doc’

‘Was the spanking her idea or yours?’

‘She said on the phone that I was being very naughty and I said I couldn’t help it. Discipline was mentioned, one thing led to another and she came round to my house again. She was eager to please because I’d promised her money.’

‘And did she please?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t as good as navigating by the stars but you made the best of it?’

‘Yes, I guess it’s different strokes for different folks, isn’t it.’

‘Anything more from Oannes?’

‘He said, “RRRRAAAAARRGH!”’

DeVere, startled, said, ‘When was that?’

‘It was during that same visit when Melissa spanked me and did the other. I was talking to Hannelore but I forgot to whisper, so I said out loud, “You’ll never grow old,” and Melissa said, “Why not? Do you think I’ll die young?” That’s when Oannes made that noise and put a picture in my mind.’

‘What was the picture?’

‘Melissa dead.’

‘How’d she die?’

‘I killed her – bashed her head in with a large round beach stone from Paxos.’

‘Does Paxos have any significance for you?’

‘Hannelore and I went there one summer.’

‘Why’d you kill her?’

‘I suppose it fits into a natural-depravity sequence: first she spanks me, then she buggers me, then I kill her. Just a normal fantasy any naturally depraved person might have. Which I seem to be although I said I wasn’t.’

‘Everybody has fantasies, Harold. Lots of them are a lot worse than that. Did you have any difficulty in not acting that one out?’

‘No.’

‘What went on with you and Melissa that evening – was it you that made it happen or Oannes?’

‘Wondering whether it’s time to wheel out the Mental Health Act, Leon?’

‘Just give me a straight answer, OK?’

‘Oannes is how my mind dresses up in order for me to say and do what I want to say and do in the Oannes mode, I’ve told you that before. It’s always me, with a little help
from Melissa that evening. Do you think I’m a danger to myself and society at large?’

‘I think everybody’s potentially a danger to himself and society; everybody is like a grenade that’s safe until you pull the pin but it isn’t always easy to know when the pin’s been pulled.’

‘You think my pin’s been pulled?’

‘I don’t know, Harold – I haven’t got all the answers, I don’t even have all the questions. Do you think you might have a self-destructive urge in you?’

‘Did you work that out all by yourself, Leon, or did you read it on the back of a cereal box?’

‘Right. I’m afraid that’s it for today. Try to stay out of major trouble and I’ll see you in a fortnight.’

‘Minor trouble isn’t really worth bothering with, Doc. See you.’

DeVere shook his head as the door closed behind Klein. At the bottom of the session notes he wrote:
Locus of control?

On the day of the viewing for the auction Klein took the Piccadilly Line to Green Park, walked up Piccadilly to St James’s Street and down St James’s Street to King Street and Christie’s. The afternoon was hot, the sunlight lay on it like a lid of heavy glass, the buildings leant and loomed threateningly.

Christie’s looked august, impassive, authoritarian; it was hard to imagine the artists, some of them undoubtedly less than respectable, who had produced by the labour of hand and eye the works that would be sold here. Melissa was waiting for him in the lobby where the carpet seemed to belong to a hotel in somebody else’s life. ‘If this is what this is,’ Klein whispered into his hand, ‘and she is who she is, who am I?’

‘Hello, Harold,’ she said. She was very smart in a black trouser suit. Klein was wearing jeans, a tired-looking blue shirt, and some sort of safari jacket. Muttering under his breath, he was at the same time proud to be seen with Melissa and resentful of her presence; he would have preferred to be alone among these strangers with the winged horse that had for so many years been the tutelary god of his workroom. Seeing the painting in the catalogue
that Christie’s had sent him had already made it no longer his. The catalogue cost £25 and weighed about a kilo; he gave it to Melissa to carry as they went up the stairs to the Main Room.

The daylight through the skylight was reflected in the parquet floor on which the viewers’ footsteps echoed implacably, saying flatly that anything can be bought and sold. The prospective buyers, singly and in groups, catalogues in hand, made their slow circuit, bypassing a TV cameraman focusing on an expert-looking man who held a sheaf of documents. Klein was usually able to spot Americans by the hang of their faces and he saw quite a few, some of them patently heavy hitters and others probably tourists making a culture stop among the serious punters who spoke three or four languages and had eyes like basilisks.

The fifty-three lots on view included French, German, Dutch, and English Romanticists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Pre-Raphaelites. There were major Monets, minor Courbets, middle Corots, an early Renoir, a late Degas, a stray Ensor, a Moreau
Salome
watercolour sketch, and a
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
charcoal drawing by Daumier with what Klein considered an insulting under-estimate of £40,000-60,000.

‘What are you whispering about now?’ said Melissa.

‘Market forces and mental flab.’

Pegase Noir,
Lot 37, was between a Puvis de Chavannes
Regret
and a
Despair
by Watts.
Look at me,
said the winged horse to Klein.
Is this what you wanted? Are you happy now?

‘Those two set him off quite well, I think,’ said Melissa. ‘He really looks perky next to them.’

Klein whispered something into his hand but she didn’t ask what it was.

A tall heavyset big-money sort of American with a big-money-sort-of-American’s-blonde paused in front of the Redon. ‘Look out, Odilon,’ whispered Klein, ‘Las Vegas has arrived.’

The man consulted his catalogue. ‘Four to six hundred thousand,’ he said.

‘You into Symbolists now?’ said the woman.

‘I’m getting a feeling.’

‘The last time you had a feeling it was a horse too.’

‘That one couldn’t run but I think this one’s going to fly. It’s strange, it’s mystical.’

‘The question is, how much do you want to put on a mystical horse?’

‘Well, it’s that kind of a time – lots of interest in UFOs, alien abductions, X-files, that kind of thing.’

‘Would you call a flying horse a UFO?’

‘Mystics are in these days. Glenn Hoddle even hired a faith healer for the England team.’

‘Did they win whatever they were playing?’

‘That’s beside the point.’ They drifted away, the man’s gestures indicating that the feeling was getting stronger.

‘He’s right,’ said Klein. ‘That horse is going to fly.’

‘Here I am and Hannelore’s dead,’ he whispered into his hand.

‘What do you think of Moreau?’ said Melissa. She was standing in front of the
Salome
watercolour, over estimated, in Klein’s opinion, at £300,000-350,000.

‘Some of his sketches are pretty good,’ he said, ‘but his finishes tend to be a little obvious.’

‘You don’t think he’s as good as Redon?’

‘For me he’s not in the same class.’

‘Why not?’

‘Even when he’s at his very best, you can see how Moreau reasoned out his pictures, how he put the elements
together; with Redon you can’t: his ideas and images came from unknown places far away – they came looking for him and they made him visualise strange worlds. His kind of genius is very rare.’

‘You like strangeness, don’t you, Harold.’

‘Yes, I do. Reality is so strange that it can never be completely grasped; it takes a strange artist to get past the front of it and Redon is the strangest artist I know, miles ahead of the surrealists. He didn’t try to be clever – he just did it the way it showed itself to him.’

‘Harold, are you unhappy about selling the painting?’

‘Do you care whether I am or not?’

‘Of course I care. Maybe I’m not the kind of person you’d like me to be and maybe you’re not getting all you want from me but we
have
got a relationship; I’m something to you and you’re something to me.’

‘The question is, what?’

‘Surely you know by now, Harold, that you can’t always define things clearly and if you try too hard you can make them go away altogether. It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: you can determine the position of a moving particle or its momentum, but not both at the same time.’

‘OK, so what’s the position with us?’

She looked at him sidewise and laughed. ‘We’ve tried one or two, haven’t we. They contribute to the momentum, don’t you think? We’ve got a good little mysterious something going between us, Prof, something strange – don’t spoil it.’

‘I’m not in love with her,’ Klein whispered into his hand. ‘That would be too pathetic.’

‘What are you whispering?’

‘I’m not in love with you, Melissa.’

‘That’s perfectly all right, Harold, but if you want to be in love with me, that’s all right too. An experience can be life-enriching even when it’s emotionally frustrating.’ She said this tenderly, with her hand on his arm and her blue eyes full on him. Klein kissed her and she kissed him back.

‘This is my life now,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘The past doesn’t go away but the present steps in front of it.’ There swam into his mind the fish in the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital lobby, observing with perpetually open eyes the ichthyocentric world on the other side of the glass. He sighed.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Melissa.

‘I’m being attacked by random metaphors.’

‘Try to avoid eye contact, maybe they’ll go away.’

They continued their viewing, with Klein lingering longest at nudes and marine paintings. As they stood in front of a deliciously seductive
Nu allonge dans le studio
by Paul-Cesar Helleu she said, ‘Tell me, Prof, how is this different from pornography?’

‘That’s a tough one, and I have lain awake many nights pondering that very question.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘You’ll have to ask Boots.’

‘Boots the Chemists?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How’s that?’

‘If I were to photograph this painting and take my film to Boots, they would process it and give me prints of Mademoiselle Allonge with no questions asked. If it were pornography they wouldn’t.’

‘Thanks. It’s good that I have you to explain these things to me.’

‘That’s the advantage of hanging out with an art historian – you get these professional insights for free.’

‘And what is it with all these sailing vessels in calm and heavy weather?’ They had by then moved on to
Shipping in Choppy Waters
by the Dutch painter Abraham Hulk.

‘Well, first of all life is a sometimes calm, sometimes stormy sea, OK?’

‘Right.’

‘So you’ve got a good solid metaphor to begin with; then there’s the rigging.’