Nuns and Soldiers (21 page)

When his companions at the Slade had laughed him out of the life class, he took to abstract painting with an obsessive fanaticism. He lived in a sea of graph paper. His squares became dots, pin-pricks, then something invisible. It was (as someone said at the time) like a not very gifted savage trying to invent mathematics. It was as if he wanted to decode the world. His paintings looked like elaborate diagrams yet what were they diagrams of? If he could only cover
everything
with a fine enough mesh ... If he could only
get it right.
Sometimes in dreams he thought that he had done so. No one liked these ‘fanatical’ paintings, and in the end for Tim they became a sort of sterile torment. Then one day (he could never explain how) it was as if the mesh began to bend and bulge and ever so quietly other forms came through it. When he returned to organic being it was as to something which had been vastly feeding in captivity. Everything now was plump, enlaced, tropical. Live existence which had been nowhere was now everywhere. Everything curved and undulated and swelled and swayed. He drew human fishes, human fruits, deep seas full of knowing embryos and jigging jelly. No one liked these paintings much either, they said they were derivative which they were. Of course this too was only a phase.

Someone (it was Jimmy Roland’s sister Nancy) had once said to Tim, ‘You painters must feel as if you are creating the world.’ Tim never felt like that. He felt at his best working moments a sense of total relaxation. Of course he was not creating the world, he was discovering it, not even that, he was just seeing it and letting it continue to manifest itself. He was not even sure, at these good moments, whether what he was doing was ‘reproducing’. He was just there, active as a part of the world, a
transparent
part. Daisy, who hated music, had once said to denigrate that art, ‘Music is like chess, it’s all there beforehand, all you do is find it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Tim. That was exactly what he felt about painting.

However by now the days of the ‘mesh’ and of the rediscovery of the world belonged to the far past, though he still occasionally did ink drawings of fat monsters smudged with water colour, or portrayed himself and Daisy as bulbs or sprouting seeds or fish. The ‘good times’ Tim had now were when he was drawing his crucifixion figures. Why did he, in order to care about them, have to think of them as uninvolved spectators of something frightful? He would never see or paint a crucifixion. The great drama and passion of the world had already passed him by; and it occurred to him that the ordeal by which he was to win his Papagena would turn out to be simply this, that there was no ordeal, one simply soldiered on becoming older and balder and less talented. His army service was to grow old in the ranks without glory. Meanwhile there were the great consolations, drawing and Daisy and drink, and going to the National Gallery. The great pictures were Tim’s heaven, where pain became beautiful and calm and wise. The dead Christ lies parchment-pale among the holy women, whose crystal tears shine like jewels upon the canvas.

But sometimes at night he had a dream of hell. He was in the National Gallery and the pictures were all gone, or all darkened so that the forms could scarcely be discerned. Or else, and this was worst of all, he suddenly saw that they were trivial, valueless, inane.

 

 

‘Bloody baked beans again,’ said Daisy.

Tim and Daisy were sitting down to their lunch. Lunch consisted of baked beans on toast, boiled cabbage, brown bread and golden syrup (a favourite of Daisy’s) and a bottle of white wine.

‘You said you were tired of spaghetti and potatoes and -’

‘Spuds and spadgers fill you up at least. Never mind, this looks delicious. Fill my glass, dear boy.’

‘Had a good morning?’ said Tim. Daisy’s arrival always gave him a feeling of festival. He dealt with her glass, then poured the beans onto the toast from a saucepan.

‘Fucking awful. How are the pussies getting on?’

‘OK. I’ve done four of these.’

‘Not bad. I can’t think how you manage to make them look all the same. Actually I like the sticks in-front attitude better.’ Daisy meant Perkins’s way of sitting upright with both back legs projecting rigidly forward along the ground.

Daisy had decided to look sexy again today. She was wearing a long Indian cotton robe of an intense greenish blue, with a design of stylized brown trees upon it. She had surrounded her eyes with a thick powdery make-up of a matching blue, her Etruscan look. Her dark short hair looked glossy, almost as if it were wet. Her haggard handsome thin face beamed with energy and discontent.

‘Why don’t you do some dogs? You did some good sketches of Barkiss and that door-mat animal in the park. Have you lost them?’

‘I never lose anything.’

‘You’re as tidy as an old maid. Why don’t you work them up? There are dog lovers too, you know.’

‘Could do.’

‘I wonder where old Barkiss is now? The Prince isn’t the same without him. I bet that ghastly American actor took him away in his car. I don’t love any creature except Barkiss and maybe you. Where is he now, that noble animal?’

‘But it’s not much good piling up the pix if I can’t sell them.’

‘Oh do stop binding. Think of something. How will we eat, where will we sleep?’

‘Edward the Confessor slept underneath the dresser, when that began to pall he slept in the hall.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, and don’t stare so, I know I’m a messy eater, you eat like a cat, you’d bury your shit if you could.’

‘Don’t be so vulnerable and touchy.’

‘I’m not vulnerable and touchy, do you want me to break something? OK, I’m vulnerable and touchy. Well, God will provide. And don’t be so bloody mean with the wine, young Reede.’

‘I told you that cookery book fell through.’

‘Yes, twice. You’re good at funny drawings -’

‘So are you.’

‘Don’t start that, boy. You’re good at funny drawings, you could illustrate a language book, you know, English for foreigners or something. Why don’t you go round the publishers and show them some stuff? OK, you’re too frightened. Somebody might be nasty to you. I think you’re the most cowardly person I ever met. I may be a cow, but I’m not a coward.’

‘Well, we are poor but we are honest.’

‘Honest? You? You’re the biggest liar in North Soho, I can’t say stronger than that. I think you positively like lying, you do it selflessly for its own sake. God, to think that when I first saw those beautiful blue eyes I believed everything you said!’

‘OK, OK, now I have an idea.’

‘I’ve got an idea, I had it yesterday but I forgot. Why don’t you copy the animals in the National Gallery, just by themselves, and put them into glossy frames like the mogs? You’re so good at copying. They could look awfully charming those animals.’

‘You mean like the little dog in the Van Eyck and the big soppy dog in the Death of Procris and -’

‘Yes, the place is stiff with beasties.’

‘I’ll try it -. Has your landlord been after you again about the rent?’

‘Yes, but let’s not think of that. Oh God, I feel so stir-crazy in April. I wish we could get out of London to anywhere, Market Harborough, Sutton Coldfield, Stoke-on-Trent, anywhere.’

‘Yeah. Me too. Christ, we’re nearly out of golden syrup.’

‘Don’t give it all to me, Blue Eyes, old Blue Eyes, you’re almost as nice as Barkiss.’

‘I’ll go to the National Gallery tomorrow and look at those animals. ’

‘No, for God’s sake stay here and paint cats, that’s our only hope for my rent and more golden syrup. Jesus bloody Christ, can’t you go back to that gift shop in Notting Hill? They’d take them. I know you say it’s a mingy profit but beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘And if you go to the Nat Gall you’ll just moon around and waste time. I wish I hadn’t suggested it.’

‘I get inspiration there.’

‘It’s a total fallacy that painters inspire other painters. Either you paint or you don’t, either you’re good or you’re not - It’s like being able to wiggle your ears, or like moving your scalp, which I can do and no one else can that I’ve ever met. Painting is just factual. It’s nothing to do with charming emotions. I know what you’re like in the National Gallery, you wander round in a fantasy world where everything’s easy and pretty.’

‘Beautiful, not pretty. And not easy.’

‘Easy and pretty. Prettification, that’s what your friends Titian and Veronese and Botticelli and Piero and Perugino and Uccello and all that famous old gang are on about. They take what’s awful, dreadful, mean, grim, disgusting, vile, evil, nasty, horrid, creepy-crawly in the world and they turn it into something sweet and pretty and pseudo-noble. It’s such a lie. Painting is a lie, or most of it is. No wonder Shakespeare never mentions a single painter.’

‘Yes he does. Giulio Romano. Guy told me.’

‘Guy would admire Giulio Romano!’

‘He doesn’t admire him, he just said -’

‘You can tell some truths in a book. But nearly all painting is for sweetness, it’s nice, it’s like cake, look at Matisse, look at -’

‘You don’t like any painter unless he’s sadistic like Goya.’

This was an old argument. Almost anything could start it up. Once it started they could not stop it from blundering on over the same ground to the same explosive conclusion.

‘Sadistic! You mean truthful. Your Christian friends are the real sadists, with their crucifixions and flagellations and beheadings and frying chaps on gridirons. And Saint Sebastian showing off his figure and smirking at the audience. Well, we know what
that’s
about. Never a sign of real pain in the whole
galère.
’

‘If there’s no pain then it’s not sadistic.’

‘It’s never-never-land art. At least Goya
cares.
God, have we eaten everything already? Give me some more wine for Christ’s sake. Your painting was always prettykins, or rather you chose such a weak soppy lot to copy, you never had any ideas of your own, at least you never thought it meant anything, you were right to give it up.’

‘I haven’t given it up!’

‘I used to imagine you could draw, and to think I wanted you to do me as the madonna once for a lark!’

‘You’ve really given it up. You might at least try, even just to earn us some cash.’

‘Fuck painting. I’m a writer. You can say something that matters in a book.’

‘Well, maybe you were right to give it up. There never have been any good women painters, and there never will be. No sex drive, no imagination. No women mathematicians, no women composers, no -’

‘Oh stop rubbishing, you know you’re only doing it to hurt me. Ever since the bloody world bloody started bloody men have been sitting down and being waited on by women, and even when women get some education they can’t concentrate because they have to jump up whenever little mannie arrives -’

‘Yah!’

‘And who the hell are you, Tim Reede, you put on airs and a fancy smock and who do you think you’re impressing? You can’t do
anything
, you’re less use to the world than the bloody man who picks up the bloody glasses in the bloody pub, you’re a parasite, a scrounger, living out of other people’s fridges, a toadie, a mean cadger, you’ve got the soul of a servant and a bloody useless dishonest one at that -’

‘Daisy - darling -’

‘Oh shit! Don’t darling me, and don’t start reminding me that you pay my rent.’

‘I wasn’t going to -’

‘All right, go away, fuck off, if you’re fed up, I’m not asking you to stay, go and find yourself a nice little typist, at least she could earn some money for you to live on. No more beans on toast. You could have a little house in Ealing and a dear little mortgage and a couple of bloody kids, just like everybody else, except that you’d be living on your wife. Oh you make me so mad, you’re so bloody pleased with yourself -’

‘I’m not -’

‘You think you’re not but you are. I’ve seen you when you thought no one was looking, with your perky little face so jaunty like a little bantam cock, and peeking at yourself in the mirror and prinking and smirking. You think you’re a wonderful little man,
awfully
sweet and
rather
clever and thoroughly harmless and lovable and nice. Oh Jesus bloody Christ! Let’s face it, we’d be better apart, we just torment each other, we drag each other down, with our pretences and with our lies, it’s all lies, Tim, let’s chuck it ... We’re
bad
for each other, we meet just where we’re most unreal. You want to go, why don’t you say so, why do you mask it in these spiteful attacks? Leave me alone. You think I couldn’t manage without you? I could manage bloody better. I’d pull myself together and
do
something if I hadn’t got you fussing around and pretending to look after me.’

‘Oh Daisy, stow it. We say these things, it means nothing. We’re us, we’re together, there isn’t anything else. Let’s love each other, what else can we do? Have some more wine.’

‘Have some more wine seems to be the final solution every time. OK, you pay my rent, do you think I enjoy it?’

‘I’ve got that job for September.’

‘September!’

‘We can manage if we drink less and don’t buy clothes.’

‘You mean if I drink less and don’t buy clothes. Yet, this dress is new, at least it’s new to me. I got it in a second-hand shop. It cost -’

‘Oh never mind! I say we’ll
manage.
’

‘I suppose we won’t die. Sometimes I wish I could. Life with you is beastly. Another life might be better. I just can’t arrange it. As you say we’re poor old us and we’d better love each other. My novel will make some money. I know you don’t think so! Only I can’t write at present, I try every day but I’m blocked. We’re a priceless pair. We’re landed with each other all right. Oh fuck, the wine’s finished. What are we going to do with ourselves?’

‘You could move in here I suppose.’

‘In this space we’d kill each other.’