Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (2 page)

And artistically? How was I doing there? Middling, dear heart. Wild ambition, mad joy, and bitter despair accompanied by the sound of tearing canvas. If something’s really bad, there’s nothing for it but to slice it up. If there’s the faintest possibility of development, of happy accidents and sudden inspiration, scrape and paint over, but a truly unsatisfactory image will seep through to deaden any new work. Besides, destruction is the twin of creation. Rip, slash, “Off with her head,” as Nanny says. I want to paint blood and flesh. I want to wake people up—even sleepy, alcoholic clubmen—and
make them look.

At what? There’s the chief thing: finding the right image. Something was coming; I could feel an idea in the back of my mind, growing but not quite full blown, so I was looking at everything and searching to find a design that would create the right effect. I was painting a lot of mouths with shiny white teeth, like the screaming woman in Poussin’s
Massacre of the Innocents
, last seen when I was a boy in Paris. I wanted to paint a scream and I needed a carcass for the mouth.

I tried painting the nurse in
The Battleship Potemkin.
Have you seen that tremendous Russian film? The pure genius of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence? The crowd fired upon, the nurse hit, her baby’s carriage rocketing off down the steps? Emblematic of my own fate, I suspect, if not for my nan, who kept a firm hand on my young life and protected me from my mother’s indifference and my father’s violence.

Still, that scream moves me, and I have to find the right image for the cry of creation and destruction, of pain and pleasure, because I believe in nothing else. I’m a connoisseur of extremity, of excess emotion and extraordinary sensation, and that spring was as good a time as there ever was to indulge, what with the dodgy show in France and the suspicion that this time the Channel might not be wide enough.

I’d better tell you about one night in particular—not nearly as intense as some, but important in the larger picture. That’s often the way: a little patch of color, a single line, the toning up or down of a hue can affect the whole image, so an incident that seems peripheral at the time turns out to alter your life. I was out on my own because Arnold was back for an evening with the family that he was shortly to abandon for me, for disgrace and ecstasy. It’s not vanity if I say I understood his choice. Arnold was drawn to extremes, but, being respectable, personal disaster was a good deal easier and quicker to come by for him than for me.

Anyway, on the night in question—another favorite, quasi-official phrase of my nan’s—I was doing my rounds, tin hat on, gas mask shouldered—I haven’t mentioned yet that I was on His Majesty’s Service in a modest way as an ARP warden. A certain irony in my being equipped with a badge and authority, but, as the catch phrase went, there was a war on. To my considerable relief, the military rejected asthmatics, the fire service too, so I was in Air Raid Precautions, a certified busybody who went around to check that window blinds were down and never a light showing; that car lights were off or properly shielded, torches ditto; and that pubs hid all merriment with light-proof curtains and that everyone was equipped with a gas mask.

I was laboring on the preparedness front line though there was still nary a plane in the sky or a puff of gas on the breeze. While awaiting Herr Hitler’s shock troops and paratroopers, we wardens practiced for catastrophe on poor smashed pedestrians and cyclists caught broadside by darkened cars and invisible lorries, and on hellish motor accidents that began with the sudden roar of metals simultaneously meeting and ripping apart and continued in the flare of burning petrol as mangled bodies were lifted onto the sidewalk. A rehearsal, that, for horrors to come, though we didn’t know it then.

My post was near the two rooms plus studio that Nan and I rented. Every evening, I checked my blocks of houses, looked in at the pubs, and reported to HQ. If all was quiet and good when my shift ended, I was free to saunter down to one of the drinking clubs that catered to gentlemen too impatient to respond to adverts or to other types who never pick up the
Times
. Not being a domestic animal, I needed a night out now and again.

When, truly, the world could be beautiful. Streets empty, sky like discolored pewter, lightening toward the Thames. A monochrome world of sound, not color. Listen for the wind, for the hum of tires on pavement, the whirr of a coasting bicycle, for footsteps, a voice. On certain narrow streets, dark as closets, I listened to my own footsteps, one hand out for pillar boxes and lampposts, or to brace my fall if a high curb surprised me. But if the moon rose out of the clouds, it was lovely, the dross and awkwardness, the architectural errors and compromises all submerged in a close harmony of silvers, blacks, and grays, and I could have walked all night but for want of a drink.

And hark, music sliding from behind thick blackout curtains issued an invitation. A half block away, down a set of basement steps, I entered a little private club favored by “resting” actors, bent coppers, and middle-aged steamers, with a side room where painted boys danced together, tangos by preference. It was a dusty, squalid place, one of a number I know, but I like contrasts; they get the blood going and I can’t live without them. I like the cold, pure city of moonlight and the smoky fug of basement rooms. I like luxury and a few grand relatives, and I like squalor and hungry boys and rough trade.

I made my way into the club that night and put my tin hat on the bar to a good deal of joshing and whistling—they’re all mad for uniforms—until I pulled up my pant leg to flash my fishnet stockings. This promoted such laugher that the barman, red-faced with curly black hair and a drinker’s discolored nose, offered a glass of champers gratis for “cheering them up.”

“Such a moaning tonight,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe.”

“Bad night? Darlings, a warm, moonlit night in the blackout?”

“You hadn’t heard, then?” A little pause. I shook my head. “Damien’s bought it.”

“Damien? The skinny blonde with the violet eye shadow? That Damien?” We’d had a drink together not three nights before. Not my type, but I hate to drink alone and I believe in helping the needy with the needful.

“Found him this morning—yesterday morning, I’d better say now.”

“No! Had he—” First thought, of course. A slight, underfed boy with slim legs and a consumptive cough, Damien sometimes slept rough in the park. He had blue circles under his eyes from his illness and often a fine set of bruises from his livelihood.

“Someone did for him. Beat his head in.”

“Some cheap thug.” Opinion courtesy of a hollow-cheeked punter in a gaudy striped jacket and elaborately made-up eyes.

“Killed for a few shillings?” Possible. We all knew Damien was on the game. And fair game for any predator: timid as a mouse, the boy couldn’t have weighed eight stone.

“Why else?” An ill-chosen greenish paint gave striped jacket lizard eyes.

Let me count the ways! I was about to say, then stopped. Too much knowledge can get you into trouble. I’m rarely discreet, but a man at the far end of the bar gave off a distinct whiff of cop—and of something else, more elusive, that slipped away as soon as it surfaced. “Some madman,” I said.

“You’re right there. You’re right there!”

“Now, don’t you start again, Connie. Don’t start,” the barman appealed.

Connie, a short youth with bad teeth and garnet lipstick, ignored this plea. “He was me mate,” he wailed. “If I got down, he cheered me up. He’d have given me his last mascara.”

Laughter at this, but not unkind.

“You knew him,” he said to me, and I nodded. I’d painted him, as a matter of fact, a little sketch of him and Connie sitting on the sofa in my studio. A couple of years ago, that was. “You knew the sort he was. No trouble to anybody. Harmless as they come. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone.” He gripped my arm and began sobbing against my uniform.

“What about a drink to Damien’s memory, eh?” I gestured to the barman with my glass.

“He did so like Champagne,” Connie conceded, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Someone promise him Champagne, you think?” I asked.

“So he said. He said this one was gold. He should have taken me with him.” A touch of resentment. “More fun. Safer, too.”

“But not necessarily better,” I suggested. Particularly for dark-hearted folk. You get them in all cities—countryside, too, no doubt, but I avoid the pastoral like the plague. I’m drawn, myself, to a certain darkness of soul, but unlike poor Damien I’m tough. I managed London on my own at sixteen and Berlin,
auf Deutsch
no less, picked up gratis from a lot of elderly steamers. I did even better in Paris, my finishing school, where I had contacts and fluent French and developed an eye for the main chance. Of necessity, I’ve been a quick study. I was expelled on suspicion of immorality after two years in a minor public school, and I’ve learned most of what’s been useful to me, including furniture design and the rudiments of oil painting, from randy middle-aged men with an eye for youthful faces. Bless them all—or ninety percent of them anyway. Still, bad thoughts about Damien and bodies in the street. I paid for the round and left.

“Mind yourself in the dark,” said the barman.

I slapped on my tin hat and tapped it. “Off on His Majesty’s service,” I said. His laughter followed me, and I turned and waved to him at the curtain. The heavy type at the end had raised his head. Copper? I was sure of it now.

Nan was in the kitchen with her wireless on, a birthday gift from me with a little help from Arnold, who finds her amusing. She was listening to the evacuation news on the Beeb. A bloody disaster. Belgium finished, French lines collapsed, armies streaming for the coast and Dunkirk. I’m not best suited for regimentation, and living with my father inoculated me against all the temptations of brass and polish. I’m not even fond of guardsmen, that traditional London recreation, but boys I know are in France, and with better lungs I could be stranded on the beach myself. Lately, what with car crashes and pedestrian disasters, I’ve seen blood and dismemberment on a small scale, and I can imagine worse. I don’t like the picture.

The news reader was giving out the surprisingly high evacuation numbers—more than 100,000 already—and describing the small boats crossing the channel to help, but from my studio I was watching a crisis nearer to home. Nan was preparing some carrots, and I noticed that she filled the pot by ear, tipping her head to listen to the rising sound of the water. She selected the carrots by touch, which made me unhappy about the paring knife, even though she’s skillful. Slow but skillful.

I’d stepped back for a moment to check the proportions on my canvas when I realized that I could see her feeling for the thin root end of each carrot, checking that she’d cut all the leaves, and listening for the water. She sometimes jokes about her eyes—“I’ve no more sight than a bat,” she’ll say. Then she sets off for the shops and lifts something if we’re short though she’s nearly blind. Admit it; Nan’s nearly blind. She must judge the clerk’s presence by sound—an appalling, exciting risk, such as I appreciate, but still . . . at her age. That’s another topic I normally avoid, because, although normally fearless, I’m fearful for Nan, whom I love. I’m quite aware that she’s all that stands between me and total self-absorption. And beyond that, what would I do without her in so many practical ways?

“Need some help, Nan?”

“No, but come hear this, dear boy. We’re getting them home! Frenchies, too. Herr Hitler doesn’t know who he’s dealing with this time.”

I stuck my brushes in a jar of turps and wiped my hands.

“If only the weather holds. It’s got to hold another day or so.”

“How many left?”

“Three, four hundred thousand.”

I shook my head. Ypres numbers, Paschendale numbers—the hitherto unimaginable dimensions of the last war.

“We’ll get them,” said Nan. “We’ll get them. The British Navy’s worth more than all those damn panzers. You’ll see.”

I gave her a hug. “So, dinner, Nan. What’s on tonight?” I didn’t want to talk about the disaster across the Channel; I’d like to have switched off the set, but Nan was rapt. It’s as if the war never really ended for her generation, as if the past twenty years has been one long truce, and they’ve expected this all the time.

And they were right; disaster’s always waiting in the wings or down in some basement accommodation. Consider poor consumptive Damien, who lingers in my mind. I’d gotten more details by then: he’d been dumped in the park with his head bashed in and multiple cuts and bruises. We shared lung trouble, Damien and I; we were acquainted with suffocation, with screams inside and out. With the human condition, I’m tempted to add, for now came the report that the Jerries were strafing the beaches and ships. I was only distracted from visions of flames and blood when I noticed Nan touching the knobs on the stove. Would she attempt the burner and threaten the whole block? “Light the stove for me, dear boy,” she said. One crisis averted; she knows her limitations, at least for today.

And do I know mine? A good question that may soon be answered, because I’ve now seen “the cop” several times since I spotted him the night I learned Damien had been murdered. He’s just around, nothing aggressive—he lives in Chelsea for all I know—but he’s become someone I notice leaving the newsstand, perhaps, or waiting for a bus or sitting well back in a pub. Though it’s quite irrational, I think that’s why the unlucky Damien sticks in my mind’s eye, lying naked in the high grass of the park, disfigured and dead. Modern distortion, if you like. I’ve made three “Damien” paintings since but sliced them all up. Damien alone is too simple. David, remember, painted the dead Marat. And Goya—you can hardly speak of Goya without corpses and atrocities. I’m still looking for the right image for Damien and for my scream, too.

Although there, given our catastrophic historical moment, the daily press has been an inspiration. I’ve been cutting out pictures of Hitler and Mussolini, who wear interesting hats and want to devour the earth. I can use them. I’ve begun painting Hitler’s limousine with its gleaming sides and little swastikas, and I want to put Damien in there too, another screamer. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, as I have some difficulties with indicating space. I’ll maybe have to get rid of the big car and turn the shape into Damien on his knees in the park, pleading for his life. You can do that with oil paints, scrape and paint over and turn one thing into another—and leave traces of the original underneath, too, if there’s some relationship. If. An oil painting carries traces of its own history, a record that some days I like—and other days I destroy.