SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (18 page)

'The one who was twenty years older than you and was letting his waistband out as he grew more spherical?'

'That's the one. Well, he asked me to marry him this week.' Alison started laughing. 'Can
I
guess the answer?'

'The thing is ...
I
had slept with him from time to time.
I
didn't really think of it as an affair, to be honest.'

'More of a sleep-over. '

'More of a monthly sleep-over.
I
mean he's very sweet and always very nice to me and ... Oh God, Alison.'

'Made a change from Owen,
I
should think. Which
I
daresay you needed. No harm done, is there, and
I
should think he got his money's worth, knowing you.'

'Owen could be sweet when
it suited him, you know Let's
not start slagging off men.'

'Why not? They spend half their lives slagging off women.'

'Anyway, there's something else.'

'Christ, Sylvie, where do you get your energy? Not surprised you haven't finished your book.' Sylvie took a deep breath. 'Last night
I
slept with Tom Helsey.' For the first time Alison's lips tightened. Any trace of a smile now disappeared. Her head seemed to ratchet one more inch down into her spine.

'Are you out of your mind?'

'
I
couldn't remember what you said about him exactly ...
I
mean I'd had a few drinks.'

'Did he tell you he was getting divorced?' Now Sylvie's lips tightened.

'Yes.
I
mean, he is getting divorced.'

'No, he isn't, but that's his line. I've been told. He's already worked his way through all the old slappers over in the science block, so now he's moving in on the Signum, is he? He only shifted his attention to the staff because it was made plain to him by the powers-that-be over there that if he fucked another student, he'd be out. Where did you do it?'

'Here.' Alison's small delicate features now registered a distaste intensified by incredulity.

'HERE?'

'And Hamish ... seems to know all about it.' Alison put her hand to her face.

'We're almost quorate, you know, to bring a vote of no confidence against that poisonous dwarf ... ' - who was, Sylvie couldn't help noting, several inches taller than Alison herself- 'I do hope you're not going to wobble, Sylvie. Because if you do, you'll find you don't have many friends around here.'

*

Henry Allardyce sat surrounded by minotaurs and told himself that he knew, and had always known really, that it could never have worked out. Actually he told his third wife this, since he had taken her photograph out of the drawer where he had lain it face-down after he had started his affair - was that the right word? - with Sylvie. They'd slept together no more than twenty times. Was that an affair, or merely a take-away pizza service, with some accommodation thrown in? Had he behaved like a doting older man? He had, hadn't he?

'I suppose
I
just needed a little comfort, darling. Don't hold it against me. You don't, do you?' The image in the photograph uttered no complaint, so he took that as a no. 'She was very attractive. No more attractive than you, of course. But then you haven't walked through my door for such a long time, have you? And she did, that's all.' The serene smile of the third, and by far the sanest, of Henry's spouses assured him that he need feel no guilt. He might accuse himself of a little emotional folly, if he so chose, but guilt was unnecessary. He found this comforting. He put the photograph back into place on the table and picked up the invitation that had landed on his mat.

Henry Allardyce

is
invited to the opening of

Dressmaker

by Miriam French

He was hardly ever interested in the things put on by that gallery in town. The last one -
Everything's Untrue Except the Dog
- had left him bored and baffled. But today he felt like getting out. He would lock up the gallery and walk in to Shrewsbury. He would see the exhibition, might even have a late lunch at that wine bar at the top of the hill, having checked the art section of the Oxfam bookshop. Cheer up, lads, he said to the minotaurs on the walls. You can't lose what you never owned in the first place.

Dressmaker.
In the centre of the floor was an old doll's house, a big Edwardian-looking one, and all around it, forming queues to each door, were files of miniature dressmaker's dummies on their monopod metal stands, each one tarnished with age. All the clothes on the dummies were distressed, cut or tom, and some had flashes of red satin showing through like tiny rivulets of blood. Some still had their pins sticking out at curious angles from unexpected places. Henry found it oddly moving. He normally avoided anything to which the name 'installation' could be attached, but he kept walking round and round. Fragments of old newspapers had been pasted on to the doll's house, dating from the time of the First World War, and it took him a moment to realise that the tom headlines, if you read them in sequence, spelt out:
Dressing ourselves
in
one another's
wounds.
And then when you peered through the windows of the little house you saw those photographs, the heartrending photographs from the trenches. Men slumped over their rifles, smoking. Men with bandages on legs or heads or arms, or everywhere.

'What do you think, Henry
?' This was Maria, the gallery
owner. He knew her voice so well he didn't even turn around. 'I think it's beautiful, Maria, honestly. Not sure what it is, exactly, but I'd be happy to be holding this exhibition at my gallery. '

'Then let me introduce you to the artist, Miriam French.' Henry turned around and saw the tall woman in a white trouser-suit. Her hair was either blonde or bleached and it had been cropped to within a quarter of an inch of her skull. Her eyes were aquamarine. In her heels she was a good six inches taller than Henry, and she stared down at him smiling.

'Miriam, this is Henry Allardyce. Riverside Galleries. Remember, I told you about him.'

'You have the Picassos. The
Vollard Suite.
Some of my favourite pictures in the world, but I've only seen most of them in reproduction. Any chance
I
co
uld come over and have a look?'

'Why not? When did you want to come?'

'I'm going back to London tomorrow. Would this evening be any good?'

'Fine. About seven-thirty. You know where to come?'

'I'll give her directions, Henry.'

So Henry didn't go to the wine bar. He went to Marks and Spencer instead and bought various salads, and a large pizza. Vegetarian, just in case. A couple of bottles of decent red wine, then he went back home and put his wife's photograph away again. Could it really be that one door was opening as another closed?

'This is ridiculous,' he said to himself. She couldn't be any older than Sylvie. Calm down, Henry. It's Picasso's bull's horns she wants to examine closely, not yours.

*

But in fact the evening was not ridiculous; it was remarkably pleasant. And it became evident to Henry early on that any hint of physicality was out of the question. He couldn't work out why he was so sure of this; certainly not any lack of attraction on his part. Then Miriam spoke of her partner in London, and once, instead of saying partner, she said Sue. Now we've got that out of the way, thought Henry, we might as well enjoy ourselves.

'Do you like pizza?'

'Love it.'

'Would you be vegetarian, by any chance?'

'How did you know?'

'Just a hunch. I can spot female vegetarians at fifty paces. I'm often responsible for saving them from starvation. Shropshire can be a harsh environment for herbivores. '

And for the rest of the evening, Henry gave her the benefit of his considerable knowledge about the
Vollard Suite.
She really did want to know, and he had the knowledge she needed. Once every few months a busload of students from one Shropshire school or another would turn up by arrangement, and Henry would give them a lecture for half an hour. He didn't need notes. Miriam often sprang up from her chair, and looked closely at some detail of one of the etchings. As she observed the pictures, he observed her. Not for the first time in his life, he thought it might be a shame he wasn't a woman.

As she was leaving she said, 'Thank you so much. It's been delightful, it really has. I can't tell you what it's meant to me to sit there all evening with those Picassos. If I come back here one day with my partner, would you mind if we both landed on you for a couple of hours?'

'You're more than welcome, at any time.' He meant it too. 'Give me enough notice to buy the pizza. Sue a vegetarian too, is she?' Miriam nodded. 'I know how you all tend to stick together.'

'You should have Maria over some time, you know. She'd appreciate it.'

'Can't stand her husband, unfortunately.'

'Neither can she now. He's gone. Hadn't you heard? Shacked up with some twenty year-old piece of skirt in London. Shouldn't think
that’ll last
long.'

She stopped and turned back towards him when she reached the gate.

'Do you think I might be able to do something with it? This labyrinth theme?'

'Everybody else is. But just remember, when you're in the labyrinth, you're marked for death.'

'What if you're out of the labyrinth?' Henry thought for a moment.

'You're still marked for death.'

'Then it sounds like six of one and half a dozen of the other to me.'

Nudes

That was the title of one of Sylvie's more popular lectures.

She normally started with
Walter
Sickert, a painting called
Le Lit de Cuivre.
The woman naked on the bed is only half-emerging from the murk, as though the world of Edwardian England is simply not ready for the openly naked body, as though the rotting fabric of the
zeitgeist
clings about the portrayal of nudity so as to properly obscure it. Then it was back to nineteenth-century Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Rodin. The nude of the brothel; the nude of the rub-down; the nude of athletic sexuality. For once Lionel's eyes weren't fixed on her legs. There was a minor detour then through Alma-Tadema - the nude as a spurious exemplum of antiquity. Stimulation as scholarship. The aesthete's eye as the camera lens of the pornographer. On to Klimt: Viennese corruption, a gilded invitation card slipped inside a silk chemise, followed by Egon Schiele: sex in the sanatorium, sex as tubercular derangement. One or two slides of lngres' orientalist fantasies of nubile women spread over richly woven eastern carpets. A few versions of Andromeda; and one of George and the Dragon. You didn't have to be schooled as an expert in the workings of the psyche to appreciate the significance of a man stiff in his armour approaching a naked young woman chained to a rock. Not everyone's idea of a good time on a Saturday night, but arc
hetypal all the same.
Then she would confront them with Stanley Spencer and his double portraits with that monster of subterfuge and duplicity, Patricia Preece. She explained how this woman had consumed the artist, brutally, heartlessly, with malice aforethought. His innocence was nutritious enough for her to feed upon for the rest of her life. These paintings somehow prefigured that consumption. She edged towards Francis Bacon: sex as rage, a howl against the void and then, once she was sure they were ready for it, and Lionel wouldn't pass out, Lucian Freud.