Francis Bacon in Your Blood (29 page)

‘Well, that's a family thing. My mother remained very young looking.'

‘It's great to have genes like that,' I say, attempting to introduce a little levity into the conversation.

‘I wonder,' say Francis, flashing another mirthless smile. ‘I do sometimes wonder whether George wasn't right to do what he did. But if I did it, I'd want to have the right pills to make sure I did myself in properly, because some people don't and they simply end up as vegetables. On one other occasion when he'd tried to kill himself, George left a note saying, “It's not so bad. We all have to go.” There it is. He's not here now. I went to the funeral, you know.'

‘I didn't know, Francis. I'd been wondering.'

‘It was at a place called Ilford. All his family and friends were there. I stood further back, by myself. Then after the ceremony, they started lowering the coffin into the ground and that very big friend of his, the one they call “Nipper”, went over to the coffin once it was lying down there and shouted, “You bloody fool, George!”'

There's a silence and Francis glances once again at his watch.

‘I don't know whether you could be bothered to look at the new painting I've done of George?' he says.

‘Yes, of course, Francis, I'd be very interested to see it.'

The studio looks even more astonishingly chaotic. Paint is everywhere. Trial marks of colour explode like fireworks on both sides of the studio door and up all the walls. Open tins filled with a thicket of brushes and half-spent tubes spill out on the floor which is covered by a Jackson Pollock-like skein
of paint, though this is a comparison I am wary of sharing with Francis, knowing how little he thinks of his American contemporary. Books, maltreated and daubed, are stacked up against the walls, while underfoot, in the confined space that Francis treads a thousand times a day going up to and stepping back from a canvas under way, there is an ankle-deep carpet of images, crumpled and scuffed, with a shoe surfacing here and an old passport with its corner clipped poking up there. The room is like a violently coloured memory bank from which nothing has ever been excluded.

I notice that Francis, like a traditional Belle Epoque artist, still covers his new pictures under a sheet, which he then removes dramatically with a flick of his wrist. George is shown seated on a chair against a black rectangle, a large dark doorway leading on to nothing. Half of his body has been consumed by the darkness while his flesh-coloured shadow flows liberally on to the floor as if it were his life seeping out of him.

‘I'm hoping it will be part of a triptych,' Francis says. ‘Of course one never knows with those things but I have all kinds of images dropping in to my mind.'

‘It's an amazing picture, Francis,' I say. ‘It's very sheer and simple, and of course very tragic.'

‘I'm very glad you like it, Michael,' Francis says. Then he checks his watch. ‘I think we should go now because around this time it can be really difficult to find a cab.'

In the taxi's brown gloom I watch Francis's taut frame, rigid in his raincoat, as he looks at the shopfronts going by.

‘What's Lucian been doing?' I ask, keen to get the latest gossip.

‘Well,' Francis says, after a pause, ‘Lucian has a thing about the British aristocracy and he's made it his business to become a great friend of the Devonshire family, most of whom he's painted. I myself much preferred his pictures when he worked with that tight, fine brushwork, as he did when he painted that marvellous little portrait of me. I'm not saying that because
it's of
me
. It's just that because it was more artificial I think it came across as more intense and real, and I don't think his work has got at all better since he started painting with those looser, thicker brushstrokes.'

Francis was probably right to have started off early because we've been caught in thick traffic along Knightsbridge.

‘Of course he's a very intelligent man, Lucian, but I think painting has more to do with instinct than intelligence. I mean, Churchill was brilliant in many ways but you only have to look at his paintings to see what I mean. I don't know how instinctive Lucian really is. He once tried to be homosexual, you know. Or at least so he told me. But then he said that when he went to bed with some friend of his he kept thinking “Well, that's just old Bill.”

‘But then I'm afraid,' Francis adds, in a waspish tone, ‘I'm afraid Lucian has what's called the smallest cock in England and of course you can't go far in the queer world with that.'

Lucian is already waiting for us in one of the restaurant's booths. He is wearing a beautifully cut double-breasted jacket without a shirt or vest. He has brought a tall, thin, pale young girl in a pale flowered dress with him. She reminds me of Ophelia, a silent foil to Lucian's ageing Hamlet. Lucian is affable, full of short anecdotes and private jokes. The duke arrives and introduces himself as Andrew Cavendish. I find this reassuring, since I have no idea how dukes present themselves and am half expecting him to come in trilling, as in a musical, ‘and I'm the D-u-ke of Dev-on-shire'. He is tall and also affable, as well as a little shambling and vaguely apologetic.

Francis retains his withdrawn, icy composure but is infinitely attentive to his guests' wishes. The conversation is constrained, the service impeccable. Lucian's girlfriend has ordered a partridge, which strikes me because if I heard it aright her family name was Partridge. She devours the small bird and when she find its little bloody heart she cuts it out and places it on Lucian's plate, another in-joke that they enjoy together. The food and wine and
surroundings are all perfect, but for once the evening never takes off because it lacks the manic gaiety that Francis usually infuses into these events as a matter of course, and although we have all drunk a fair amount, except for the duke, the atmosphere remains unusually sober. When dessert is served, the duke starts making short work of several large balls of chocolate ice cream. About halfway through, he glances up apologetically and says to me: ‘It must look rather ridiculous to see a middle-aged man like me gobbling up ice cream like a schoolboy, but I used to be an alcoholic and now I have to get my fill of sugar wherever I can find it.'

When the bill comes Lucian does his Charlie Chaplin fainting act into his girlfriend's lap as Francis pays. The party evaporates rapidly outside on Jermyn Street and I'm about to ask Francis whether I can drop him somewhere in Soho or back at the studio, when I sense, partly because the evening has lacked conviviality perhaps, that he has something else in mind.

‘There is a very curious club round here,' he says. ‘Ridiculously, you can't get into it unless you're in a suit and tie, but since we're wearing the right clothes I don't know whether you'd care to have one last drink there.'

The cab driver seems to know where to go, but I only vaguely catch the name of the club which sounds like the Buckingham or something like that. Given the places Francis has taken me to before, I am expecting something on the extreme side, with waiters with masks on and whips on the wall, but we are ushered into what appears to be the epitome of a London gentlemen's club. There is a porter's lodge and once we have left our coats on the brass hooks behind it we go into a room full of comfortable armchairs with, not whips, but hunting prints and various school and regimental shields on the panelled walls. As we settle in our red-leather chairs, newspapers are lowered and several pairs of eyes take our presence in. A quick dart here and there, then the eyes return to the cricket or the crossword. There is a lot of rustling and throat-clearing but no talk, as in a ‘silence library'.
Communication is limited to members ordering drinks from a dour-looking club servant. We have a double whisky. For the first time since I've been back in London, some of the icy pallor seems to have left Francis's face. The atmosphere in this room appears to fascinate him.

‘Of course they are all completely ridiculous,' he says to me in an animated whisper. ‘I think they call this place the “poofs' Athenaeum”, and they all sit round in those chairs pretending they're not queer and just waiting for something to happen to them. It never does, of course, because none of them would ever dare to make what's called the first move. So they just stay there, waiting. There's something so dreary and depressing about the whole place that I just have to come in from time to time to remind myself of it.'

Back in Paris, I went to the Grand Palais again several times before the exhibition closed. Now that George is dead, I noticed, the paintings have taken on a premonitory quality. Right from the screaming figures on the orange ground through the spectral figures in closed rooms to the images of George fragmented through every conjugation of chance injury, all the images spoke of death. ‘Death', I hear Francis's voice repeating once more as I walk through the galleries, ‘is only in the mind of the living.' Here it is all pervasive, the one ultimate and unchanging theme, and towards the end of the exhibition I half wonder whether the paintings aren't lining the walls of, and leading up to, a burial chamber.

It's been a hard year for me. I've been in and out of several short-lived professional arrangements – writing, editing or translating – as I have brief and often painful love affairs. I keep telling myself that, since my goal is to preserve my freedom and use that freedom to write more creative things, my life can be seen as a success. But when I add the difficulties of scratching a living from freelance journalism to the insecurity of serial flings
and the paucity of my literary ventures, I remain increasingly sceptical as time goes by.

It may be simply the spring and the promise of another summer to be spent overlooking the Mediterranean or watching the breakers crash on the Brittany coast, but I feel my life has taken an upturn in recent months. These things are never planned, of course, and you haven't the slightest idea where they might lead, but I have begun a relationship with a woman who is considerably older than me. Since I am now thirty – ‘
en l'an trentiesme de mon aage
/
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues
', as I repeat smugly to myself – I supposed that, although I fantasized about it as a much younger man, I had reached an age when this would no longer happen to me.

Alice is in her mid-forties (for a while she kept her real age from me), an exotic mix of Caribbean African and Indonesian, petite and extremely lively. Brought up in the north of France and educated in Paris, she is married to the well-known art historian John Rewald, chronicler of the Impressionists and world expert on Cézanne. They live fairly separate lives, however, he mainly in New York and Alice in Paris, though they often spend part of the summer together in an ancient, hilltop fortress they bought and restored in Provence. Not only is there a strong physical attraction between us, but we share many of the same interests in art and literature. Alice has been part of the international art world for twenty years and has known most of the leading artists, museum people and dealers on both sides of the Atlantic. Since John has been successful as both an historian and an art adviser to some of the wealthiest American collectors, Alice lives a much more moneyed and sophisticated life than I do. She drives a yellow Thunderbird and stays in the top hotels. What impresses me most is that she knows Picasso and has counted Giacometti and Balthus among her admirers, both of whom have done portraits of her.

Not the least of Alice's attributes is that she's really hit it off with Francis. We have had many dinners
à trois
over the past
couple of years and often I can hardly get a word in edgeways. I make a joke of this, but secretly I'm delighted. In age Francis could easily be my father and Alice is almost old enough to be my mother. I don't think about this much, but even to me it's obvious that I have in some semi-conscious way chosen new parents. On the whole I bask in their joint affection and suppose it can only soothe old wounds and help bolster my crippling lack of self-confidence. At the same time I am aware of how much like textbook psychology this sounds and, when I'm feeling resilient enough to be cynical, I reflect that by the time you're in your thirties you really do get the parents you deserve. And what I now have is an alcoholic, sadomasochistic, queer father and a flighty, exotic mistress of a mother.

Francis also appears to be coming out of the shadow of George's death now that it begins to recede into the past. He called me the other day to tell me he's just been down to what he calls melodramatically ‘the house I shall be murdered in' on Narrow Street in Limehouse. He has always had a romantic attraction to the East End, and a belief that people there – especially good-looking young men – were more ‘real' and ‘direct' than their effete, devious counterparts up west. I suppose it's the attraction of opposites, and the danger attached to it (what Wilde called ‘feasting with panthers'). I imagine there's also the fact that cultured homosexuals can fantasize more satisfactorily about toughs working in the docks or villains doing a job than they can about a straitlaced accountant or lawyer going in to an office every day in the City.