Francis Bacon in Your Blood (15 page)

On other nights we might have moved from pub to bar, restaurant to club, up and down stairs, crossing landings, knocking on doors. All London would have opened up, from luxury hotel to the latest trattoria or the last shack dispensing scalding tea and doorstop sandwiches to cab drivers at dawn. With Francis
life only takes place inside. We are condemned to a succession of rooms, the outside being no more than the interval between them. All human drama and interchange is concentrated here, in interiors closely sealed off, as in his paintings, with figures flailing. As we go around talking and drinking too much, we become the figures he has created, contorted, distorted, struggling to breathe in these airless interiors under the accrued weight of the drink and the words. We go everywhere with the magician of the night, from the cosy Maisonette to the uptight Rockingham, the Ritz to the seedy Coronation Club, the elusive Pink Elephant to the harsh, threatening but ultimately welcoming Iron Lung. When we are in one club, we discuss another, plotting our course through Soho's tightknit grid. ‘There used to be something marvellous about the Gargoyle,' Francis says, as we settle into a sofa at the Paint Box under the
patronne
's benevolent gaze. ‘But I'm afraid it's become a bit dreary these days. It has this extraordinary staircase with thousands of mirrors broken into the walls designed by Matisse, and when people came down it they looked like birds of paradise. And everyone went there. Even Sartre used to go there when he was in London. What? Well, he was very sympathetic, and he told me to look him up when I was in Paris but for some reason I never did. Anyway, the Gargoyle was a place where people could let their hair down, and it was famous for its rows. It was a club made for rows, and some of the members would come back every evening to continue their own row or to listen to someone else's. Of course the rows were usually to do with unhappy love affairs, and what is more fascinating for onlookers than what's called other people's unhappy love affairs?'

Since I have no particular hour to get up and no job to go out to, I am happy to stay the course for as long as it takes. Sometimes around midnight we have a second dinner, which always pleases me, as a kind of rest between the harder drinking bouts in the clubs. I'm always impressed by the fact that, whenever I leave him, Francis will be up in a couple of hours and into the studio,
limbering up to project another big fearful image on to the canvas, or at least padding through the rags and photos on the floor, as I groan fitfully from under the covers, hoping against hope that my day won't be devoted to nursing a hangover.

Now that I'm used again to the rigours of the English weather, however, my life has become really quite acceptable. When not on the razzle with Francis, I concentrate on my love life which, in the wake of the Orwellian
mésaventure
, has grown agreeably varied and complex. As my flatmates sit in their offices, taking orders and tending to subaltern duties, I sit by the gas fire like some big fat sexual spider awaiting my latest victim and listening to a scratched version of ‘Michelle ma belle' endlessly on the turntable. In between assignations I read widely and write fitfully, agonizing over the futility of my present lifestyle but not sufficiently to make any decisive move to change it. My mother continues to send me money, and I have even found a few honourable ways of supplementing this meagre income. I read books and translate some of them, as in Barcelona, for a variety of publishers such as John Calder and the strange, charming Tambimuttu (whom Francis can't stand – whenever he comes round and knocks on Francis's door, Francis puts his head out of the window and shouts down: ‘I'm not here'). Tambi has got me translating Henri Michaux, whom I find exciting to read but near impossible to render adequately in English. But the challenge gives my days another focus, and in any case it seems unlikely, with Tambi being so disorganized and on the verge of bankruptcy, that these translations will ever actually be published.

Since I came back from Spain, I've had little contact with my parents but my father has found out that I've been getting regular handouts from my mother and, since he is in manic phase, he has decreed (my mother tells me over the phone) that if I am incapable of finding a job he will be taking up the cudgels on my behalf. ‘It is high time', he has apparently been repeating over his pink gin, ‘that Michael stood on his own two feet.' I'm
not too worried because I reckon that as the summer fades so will his monstrous manic energy and I will be forgotten once he subsides into melancholy. Meanwhile he has had his secretary scanning the classified ads on the front page of
The Times
every morning for any job that might sound suitable, and I'm a bit put out when she comes up with a ‘Paris magazine seeks junior editor', because I can hardly say a job like that wasn't right up my alley even though I have no intention of leaving London, above all since I've just met a girl who's part oriental (an ‘octoroon', she calls herself) and could not imagine life without her.

Mercifully there's little chance of my getting the job because when I call the number on the ad I am told the editor will be interviewing over sixty candidates while he is in London. Instead of the sallow, superior Frenchman I vaguely expected when I turn up for the interview there's a red-faced, blue-eyed Englishman called Garith Windsor who looks more like a camp naval officer or bluff character actor than an editor. He annoys me right away by asking a few trick questions, but since I've decided to be sufficiently aloof to make sure I don't make it through to any short list, I give a few brief condescending answers clearly demonstrating that I'm not taken in and feel the whole thing rather beneath me. This makes him laugh, and I find myself playing up to this unexpected turn of events, thinking he doesn't seem a bad sort and what a bore it must be to have to sit there for hours appraising a load of recent graduates. So we sit and chat for a while about Paris, which I haven't visited since spending a Christmas vacation there, holed up in a cheap Left Bank hotel picnicking off roast chestnuts bought from vendors in the street and reading modern French poetry whose very impenetrability impressed me as a mark of its intellectual rigour and depth. I tell Windsor how little I care for the French even though I'm quite addicted to their culture.

I think no more about the meeting over the next few days and resume my routine of recovering sufficiently from binges with Francis to further my afternoon amours by the gas fire's flames
in the blissfully empty basement. Then I get a rude awakening in the form of an official offer, first by telephone from Paris, then by telegram, to take up the post of assistant editor at
Réalités
as soon as I can get myself to Paris. I am dumbfounded at first, then intensely annoyed with myself for having been too clever in the interview. I can only think that I stood out as the one interviewee to be offhand and unenthusiastic about working in Paris, and this in turn must have invested some illusory qualities in me that Windsor did not detect in the other more eager to dead-keen applicants. I can't think how else I could have got the job, but now I feel trapped. I can't lie to my parents and I know that my mother's allowance will be cut off if I don't take the offer up. At heart I also know that, seductive as my daily round seems, I am not getting anywhere and that perhaps, after all, another stint abroad might be just the catalyst my lacklustre career requires.

I think I have persuaded my new love to come with me although she will have to give up her steady secretarial job and I've no idea where we'll live or what she'll do. I sweep all her objections before me since I'm convinced we'll find a way if we set our minds to it, but as the date approaches she seems increasingly evasive about giving in her notice. Meanwhile, I am letting all my friends know I'm about to leave, once again, and so soon it seems to me after getting back from Spain. Francis invites me to a last dinner before I leave, and when I go round to the studio to pick him up he opens a special vintage bottle of champagne to wish me luck.

‘Now who do you know in Paris?' he asks me suavely as we sit there clinking glasses.

‘Well, no one, not a soul,' I say, suddenly alarmed at the prospect.

‘Did you ever meet Giacometti?' he asks.

‘Never,' I say. I know vaguely he's talking about a famous sculptor who lives in a dusty cave in Montparnasse, but he might as well be asking me if I know Michelangelo or Rodin.

‘Well, there is something terribly sympathetic about him,' Francis says. ‘He took a great shine to George when he was over here for his Tate show. He said, “When I'm in London I feel homosexual,” and he suggested George go over to Paris and he'd teach him French and perhaps get him a job in a picture-framing shop he knows. That would at least give George something to do. I think you'd like him so why don't you look him up when you get over there?'

‘But Francis,' I say. ‘I can't just go round and knock on his door and disturb him without any warning.'

‘Of course you can't,' says Francis rather formally. ‘I'll give you a letter of introduction and you can take it with you.'

He rummages round the books and papers on the table and comes up with a copy of
Paris Match
from which he rips a double page of war photos at the centre and with a thick green felt-tip writes: ‘
Mon cher Alberto je voudrais vous présenter un grand ami Michael Peppiatt qui arrive maintenant à Paris j'espère que vous allez bien Alberto. Francis.
'

We finish our celebratory bottle and move on to a special feast of caviare, baby lobster and grouse at Claridge's. It's clear I'm going out on a high, although my spirits are already dipping as I wake up the next morning with an aching head and pack my scuffed little suitcase with the one suit I possess, a charcoal grey that has seen better days. My old friends Magnus and Peter are there to give me a stirring farewell as I board the boat-train at Victoria. Then the backs of houses and the allotment gardens beside the track start to flit by, taking me closer and closer to a new fate, whatever that turns out to be.

PART TWO

1966–1976

 

6

Exile and Revolution

‘One of us has to go,' I whisper to myself as I lie staring at the pock-marked floral wallpaper surrounding the bed. But however spot on Oscar Wilde's witticism seems in the circumstances, it does nothing to cheer me up. The sheets I have been sleeping in turn out to be a yellowish nylon that crackles irritatingly as I shift around looking for a more comfortable position. Next door, through the thin partition, I can hear another bed creak regularly and attempt to block out what it signifies. My narrow room, with its cracked washbasin and rickety little table scarred by cigarette burns, must have harboured a hundred commercial travellers down on their luck, I imagine, and for a moment I try to transform the dingy space into a haven for fragile hopes and dreams. But it's not working. There's also an indistinct, sweetish smell I can't identify. I wonder when the sheets were changed last. This at least gets me out of bed, which I should be doing anyway. I can hear the traffic getting louder in the street, or boulevard or whatever, outside, and I certainly don't want to be late in getting to the office on my first day. I clamber into my charcoal suit and study my hopeful face in the mirror as I knot my tie and comb my hair, dampening it down to try to make it look less wild. I put a notebook and pencil in my inside pocket, thinking that's what all up-and-coming journalists should have, and march purposefully over to the door. Then I
realize what the smell is. It's not so much the accrued odour of other bodies as the smell of hopelessness.

It's not far to the
Réalités
offices on rue Saint-Georges. I already paced it out last night since I had nothing better to do. If I was keen to leave my squalid room then, I am keener still now, so since I have a good half-hour in hand I make a beeline for the café round the corner, stand at the zinc and order
un express
, lighting a Gitane to complete the picture of the young traveller effortlessly at home in foreign parts. But of course I'm not in the least at home. First of all I want to get out of that hotel for ever. Somehow I'd got it into my head that I was going to be given special treatment, since the magazine seemed so keen to get me, and be put up in comfort, if not in style. That's why I travelled first class on the boat-train coming over, not just because I was curious to see what first class was like but to show that I was equally aware of my worth. Now I'm beginning to wonder whether I'll ever get the fare reimbursed. Perhaps I've spent too much time in grand hotels with Francis to take kindly to seedy establishments, though even in Barcelona, when every peseta counted, I always managed to find a
pensión
with a smidgeon of continental charm. Nor, come to think of it, do I care much for this café, with its neon lights blinking in the grey morning, or the surly
patron
behind the bar whose grubby nylon shirt reminds me of the bed sheets I've just left behind.

Nothing gets better when I go through
Réalités
's gloomy portal and ask at the makeshift reception desk for the
Edition anglaise
.

‘
Ah les Anglais
,' says the receptionist without enthusiasm. ‘Go down the stairs and keep going as far as you can go.'

The stairway smells more and more strongly of stale cooking as I go down into the basement, and from the long trestle tables and piled-up chairs I guess that this must be the canteen for all the staff working on the various editorial offices that take up the rest of the building. Neon strips are flickering here too on the low ceiling, lighting up the metallic
serving counters that run down one wall. So far, so grotty, I say to myself airily, to keep my spirits up. At the end I spot another door, and as I get closer I can see a brass plaque with ‘
Rédaction anglaise
' engraved on it. I straighten my tie, pass a hand over my still-damp hair and knock discreetly but firmly on the door. Nothing happens. No welcoming secretary or curious colleague jumps to. I knock again, a little louder, then try the door to see if it's open.