SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (19 page)

She had also come to show more and more slides of Bonnard.

He had painted such a clutch of pictures of a woman in a bath that she'd assumed it must be some sort of obsession with him: the oceanic feeling? Primal urges still surging inside us from our distant aquatic origins? But then she read a biography and discovered that Bonnard's wife Marthe so entirely divided the day between the bed and the bath that she was effectively amphibian. So if he was going to employ wifey as an unpaid model (though he paid for her in other respects, that was for sure) then he didn't have much choice except to paint her in the bath. (She had made a note to herself: what is the long- term effect of steam on oil-paints while they're being applied to canvas? The same as on the glue of an envelope? Might Bonnard's paint already
be peeling away from those pre-
moistened surfaces? She must ask Henry. He'd surely know.)

He tended to avoid portraying Marthe' s feet. Had she become so hydrophilic that they were webbed?

Then finally Picasso. She would introduce the matter with some spurious illustrations. A sketch of a woman flamboyantly pleasuring herself, legs well apart; Picasso being fellated by one of his many mistresses. Artistically worthless, undoubtedly, but they always captured the attention. Then on to the
Vollard Suite.
She had learnt a great deal from Henry's informal tutorials. But she had also notic
ed things for herself. She had
given as well as taken; it wasn't as though she had anything to feel guilty about with Henry.
In
Picasso the women are always bathed in the gaze of the artist, as though that is all that keeps them alive: the gaze of the artist, the touch of the minotaur
In
Bonnard though, as in Degas, the women seem entirely disconnected, in a separate world, another existence into which the artist has silently intruded. They are not models either, as Picasso's invariably seemed to be, even if he happened to be married to them at the time. They are always doing something, thinking something, undergoing sorrows the artist cannot touch or redeem. They cannot be captured, they are for ever looking away or beyond. Their activities, even merely lying in a bath, are by way of an emphasis upon that melancholy state of separation and division between the seeing eye and the creature seen.

Then she'd noticed something else: in most of Bonnard's self-portraits the eyes seem almost closed, painted out to a hollow as though exhausted from the grief of looking, even though it is those same eyes which give us the image and even though the colours themselves speak of nothing but joy. But they themselves are blank, blind and blank, as if the paint of the world has come off on them from too much looking. As though they'd been blinded by the scrupulous detailing of too many rainbows.

But Picasso's eyes are whatever is the opposite of blind. He was proud of his
mirada fuerta,
that gaze which possesses what it lands upon. Those eyes are all-consuming. Leo Stein said that after he'd given Picasso some engravings to look at, the Spaniard stared at them with such intensity that by the time he'd finished it seemed surprising there'd been any marks left on the paper at all.

And how did she finish? With a photograph. A photograph of what appeared to be an object fashioned 250,000 years ago on what we now call the Golan Heights. Female, apparently. Crude enough, for sure; it wasn't about to win any National Portrait Gallery awards. It was a piece of stone scraped with tools until it had taken on the appearance of a fecund woman. Crude but potent. So it was made by a Neanderthal then, the creatures that our own ancestors,
homo sapiens,
had replaced, in whatever manner. What did this tell us? That from the very beginning in remaking the world in art we had recreated the world as a symbolic order. 'We bestow meaning by discovering creativity; we discover creativity by bestowing meaning. So there's our theme for today: art and sex, sex and art. From the Middle East of a quarter of a million years ago to the Signum Institute today, it is still more than simply a marriage of convenience.'

*

'Do you have any handouts for this lecture?' Lionel asked. How tall are you, Lionel, she wondered. If she sometimes felt
periodically
short, Lionel was more than parodic in the other direction. A gangling six and a half foot stringbean of sexual frustration and inadequacy. How many hours a night do you spend wrestling with the one-eyed python of desire, Lionel? She almost felt like performing the introductory rites herself, except that she could see Alison's hunched shoulders growing even more hunched, her menacing crouch of disapproval growing ever squatter. Why was his head always so soaked? Had he been dating a mermaid in the Mersey?

'Was it the illustrations you we
re particularly interested in?'

'They'd be great, yeah.'

'Well, they're all in the library, Lionel. There's even a few female librarians down there. So happy hunting. '

Claparède
's Drawing-Pin

With the greatest reluctance, John Tamworth had agreed to Owen's taking up residence in his flat.

'Only for a couple of weeks, Owen. I need my space.'

'We can work on this film.'

'We haven't actually got a film to work on yet.'

'I have.'

The flat in Chester overlooked the canal. You could almost see St Clare's. Almost, but not quite. The rooms were like a cinema museum, with all the posters on the wall, all the books, all the old scripts. Row upon row of videos and DVDs meant there was hardly a film you could name that wasn't there somewhere, in one form or another. Owen loved it, but he was aware that having him around all the time made John uneasy. Having Owen around made a lot of people uneasy. There was something about him, his inability to be still or let things be, the fact that he never slept for longer than four or five hours a night, that both intrigued and exhausted people. With
Johnny
, intrigue had long ago given way to exhaustion, but they still did their best work together. Whenever a Tamworth film came out without Treadle's name on it some critic would be sure to point out that, sadly, it lacked the curious electricity, that unexpected flicker and spark, they always seemed to achieve whenever they worked together. They were well and truly stuck with one another.

There was also the question
of women. It wasn't that John
was excessively zipped-up in this respect; his wife lived in a house on the other side of town, with their two children. He went back there at weekends, usually anyway, though he made sure all the bills were paid. He had an intermittent relationship with the barmaid in a local pub, who had ambitions to be a film actress, ambitions which he suspected were very unlikely to be fulfilled. Everyone's life was complicated, he knew that, so he tended not to be moralistic about such things. It was just that with Owen something else came into play, something manic and uncontrollable; power assumed too great a part, the power of words over the power of bodies. And it alarmed him.

'Two weeks maximum, Owen, is that understood?' Owen nodded. 'Nothing personal, you understand. But I need this space to work in.'

'We're going to work. Can we look at the video footage from the other day ... I don't want any sound.'

They had done this before, many times. And it had worked before, many times. 'Switch the other sound-recorder on.' So as they watched the images on the screen, Owen let the words begin. Free-associating. Saying whatever came into his mind. Most of it would be forgotten, it always was, but there was usually something there which they could use. He always seemed to find something he could get started on. He made John play the footage of the table over and over again, while he sat in silence staring at it, until the film-maker started to grow a little impatient. He simply couldn't see how there could be too much there of interest.

'For thirty years it's been here, this table, and its marks are its memory. As I stare down at its surface today, I realise it has more memory than I do. The marks inside me that you might call memory have all been erased. The table remembers its meals, its cigarette ends, its scorched rings from heated porcelain, but I can barely find the word for table. The table has been scored by its years, all the constellations of its events, and I've lost the marks, the shapes, the signs that form constellations inside me. I'm a blank sky. Black. A fresh sheet of formica. Grey. Except that it's all still in there somewhere ... '

'So it's a first-person narrative?'

'Might be.'

'Constellations. That's one of Sylvie's things, isn't it? Better make sure she's properly acknowledged this time. She still reckons we ripped her off for all that art stuff we used when we made
In The Cave'.

'She's probably right. Trouble is, I don't make a note of things I use. I take whatever I need.'

'I've noticed, Owen.'

'Let's look at the woman behind the counter again.' John wound the tape back. 'That doesn't need anything. Her image represents its own bewilderment. Let's look at the stuff on the road.' The images started to play, simultaneously haphazard and fluent as John moved the camera here and there. He usually had a Director of Photography for his work, but he was more than qualified to be his own Director of Photography when he chose. That was the route he'd arrived by.

'Sky. River. Estuary. Boat. Cloud. Speed. Sand. Quarry. These words come back into the mind like migrating birds that have been lost all winter. They fly across this sky without constellations, this sky that's starting to lighten now. There has been a siege in some lost time and towns folk are making their way back one by one. Cut that - I don't like that ... Start again. My mind is Lazarus, and it is stumbling out of the darkness to remind itself what happens in the light. Inside me are all the marks on the table, that tell me where there was heat or sharpness, pleasure or pain, but I still don't understand the signs.'

John played the footage from inside the room in the small hotel.

'I don't know whether these are my memories or someone else's, my images or someone else's, but they are crowding round now, like spectators at a crime-scene.
I
know that people have made love upon this bed, and that a man left here to go to a war, and that the woman he left behind had some mighty griefs to endure. Forthcoming griefs. But
I
don't know whether these images came naturally, or were manufactured.'

'How much do you remember, Owen?'

'More comes back every day. But there's still a lot left out.
I
think there might be one very big thing left out.'

And
I
think
I
know what it is, John thought. Might be better for you never to locate it. Alex Gregory. He re-played the images from the pier.

'And you stare and wonder, Do the boards have memories of all the feet that have walked over them? Do the iron railings remember the hundreds of thousands of fingers that have held them and stroked them? Do they remember sunshine and rain? Do the waves remember where they came from? Do ships remember their journeys, all the harbours they have entered and left? Am
I
the only one standing here without any traces of my own existence? So where did all the words come from then? All the words are there, it seems, and all the images are there too, but they've become disconnected.'

'Do we have a working title for
this?' John asked when they
had finished.

'
Claparède
's Drawing-Pin.'

'Explain.'

'
1911
. A Swiss psychiatrist called Clapar
è
de. Had a lot of patients suffering from anterograde amnesia. That's total memory wipe-out. One morning he hides a drawing-pin in his palm when he shakes hands with a female patient. The next

day she won't shake hands with him. She didn't know who he was, couldn't remember him even coming before, but she wouldn't shake hands. Now we could call this the heart of the dilemma we have here: the relationship between implicit and explicit memory, how they relate and how they don't. What stays in there; what gets erased. I'm picking up the terminology from this book Sylvie leant me.' He held up the copy of
Amnesia,
a volume Sylvie had borrowed from the Signum.