The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  The Professor Doktor has not only expressed enthusiasm for the concept but spontaneously suggested that he will contact colleagues at other European museums to get a sense of whether they would part with their treasured Sphinx or Rembrandt for a couple of months. I meanwhile have secured promises of loans of several Bacon paintings in the UK, from both private and public collections. I’m very excited now, all the more so since Francis has given his blessing to the project, although he did add that I’ll have to get the idea past Miss Beston, who ultimately decides on all such ventures for him. I dash off a letter to her, saying how much Francis likes the idea, since he has even given me the names of a couple of private owners who might be persuaded to lend. The loan letters, signed by the museum director and ready to send out, are only awaiting Miss Beston’s confirmation. Then her letter arrives, notifying me that there have been too many Bacon exhibitions of late and that she thought it would not be advisable to ‘pester’ collectors again at this point. When I inform the museum director of her decision he berates me bitterly for not having checked with her right at the beginning. It seems pointless to tell him that since I had the artist’s consent I didn’t think I needed anyone else’s permission. I’m not only deeply disappointed but confused, as if I’d taken the wrong turning somewhere and lost my way.

  The new space, now that it’s all decked out with a sofa and some cashmere throws, seemed to give me a new confidence. I’m not sure now how well founded that impression was. Perhaps these are mere externals, like the Cartier watch Alice has given me and the spectacles in rare, real tortoiseshell I’ve started to wear, and beneath there’s no real structure, no solid achievement, to build on. Something has gone wrong. Perhaps I’ve overreached, got beyond myself, tried, in the charming French expression, to fart higher than my arse. It never occurred to me that the exhibition wouldn’t work out. But it didn’t, and I still don’t know why. All I know, as another rush of white rose petals cascades to the carpet beside my desk, is that something has gone obscurely, irremediably, wrong.

  I catch myself half-singing, half-humming, ‘Autumn Leaves’. A few hours ago I was in the forest out at Fontainebleau where I go to play real tennis at the Château’s historic court from time to time. I’d taken a new girlfriend with me and afterwards we’d driven into a deserted part of the forest. Through the tall trees the sun came down in shafts of light that broke into bright coins shifting over the floor of dead, brown leaves. We don’t know each other very well but the forest smell, the soft gloom and the sense of a season ending affected us both and within minutes we had pulled off our clothes and were making love on the ground. For a moment I thought of the risks we were taking but it was too late, things had gone too far. Then the moment was over, and the forest was still empty, still silent. We got dressed again, picking bits of undergrowth off each other’s sweater, feeling foolish and embarrassed, but also secretly pleased that we’d broken the rules and had apparently got away with it.

  I call her ‘la Polonaise’, and I already know she is more determined than the others. Since Alice generally turns a blind eye to my hanky-panky, I have made the most of whatever comes my way: the bored collector’s wife, the ambitious gallery assistant, the fiancée in search of a final fling. They mostly let me grab my get and go, not willingly, sometimes not without tears, but they don’t try that hard to pin me down. They are perhaps the nicer, the more generous and accepting ones. Then there are the others who on the flimsiest pretext stake their claim, make scenes, cling and threaten, first blackmail, then suicide. But with the Polonaise, there was a tariff from the start, with a meter ticking loudly. The restaurants where she wants to dine grow more expensive, the taxis more frequent, and every time we make love the demands go up and the tone grows more shrill; if I have a Cartier wristwatch, why shouldn’t she? I try to be discreet about my indiscretions but soon the Polonaise wants a showdown, insisting that we go to whichever gallery opening or party where we are most likely to bump into Alice or one of her close friends who will assume it is her sacred duty to report the sighting back immediately.

  My relationship with the Polonaise is also growing increasingly acrimonious, and I know I should break it off. From being a pleasure for the first few days it has turned steadily into a punishment. Yet I feel paralysed, powerless, incapable of ending the wretched affair, even though it’s harming me in all kinds of ways. I can’t understand why I don’t react strongly, decisively, since I have never detected any masochism or passivity in my make-up before. I do feel a strong sense of guilt, however: guilt towards Alice, and guilt towards myself, oddly, for having got into such an unenviable and seemingly inextricable situation. So perhaps I am getting what I deserve. Perhaps I deserve to be punished, and unconsciously I’m giving the Polonaise the whip-hand to take it out on me.

  That’s not the only the sign of strange behaviour. If I were myself (I keep repeating that expression, worrying what this shifting, shapeless concept of self really means), I’d have done something about the rats that have infested our building like many others in the Marais. They first started pouring out in their hundreds of thousands when the Halles were pulled down, and there have been regular waves of them ever since whenever any major excavation goes on in the area. They are always there, of course, scuttling underground along the drains and down in the sewers. There’s a shop I know reassuringly called ‘Attila’ that promises dératisation and has several enormous dead rats hanging by their tails in its window display to prove the point. I know I should call them in, even though it’s always impossible to get everyone in the building to share such expenses. But I’ve come to accept the rats, a bit, it occurs to me fleetingly, like I’ve come to accept the Polonaise, as if they’re something I deserve. At first they’d dart behind the radiators and disappear down some unseen hole when I went over to them brandishing whatever came to hand, a paper knife or a half-drunk bottle of wine. Now I don’t bother, I even fancy I recognise a few of them as I sit over my typewriter and its page jutting up, crisp and clean. The rats appear to know that I’m no threat to them, and now they criss-cross, I’m sure I’m imagining it, with an arrogantly slow roll of their greasy shoulders.

  I’m not much of a threat to anyone, it seems. My female guests have increasingly less to fear. They continue to climb the three steep flights of scrubbed wooden stairs, and sometimes I wonder whether in their relief there isn’t the teeniest little bit of disappointment when they re-emerge unscathed from the lion’s den. This lion is caged between an old love that hasn’t died and a new love that was stillborn. All this lion is doing is making sure he sweeps up every last dropping the rats scatter in insolent abundance around him. That’s how much of a lion he still is, an excrement sweeper, and perhaps it’s not surprising in the circumstances that he no longer sleeps well. At night the scratching and the gnawing in the wainscot begins on one side of the loft only to start up again elsewhere. Our lion is still big and strong, but is he tough enough to put up with the notion of rats scurrying over his face and his sex once he’s dropped off to sleep?

  Nor is this new phenomenon very appetising, so perhaps it’s also not surprising he doesn’t settle down so heartily to meals prepared in the sight and smell of rats. Once a lover of rare red meat with bone marrow and all offal from brains to sweetbreads, the lion now eats more like a lamb, cropping salads – lamb’s lettuce indeed – off his kitchen table still lacquered the colour of dried blood. Even wine has begun to sour in his mouth, and the combination has resulted in that loss of a couple of kilos he has long wanted, back to the lion’s fighting weight when he was twenty-five, except that it hasn’t stopped there, and now his clothes begin to flap around him and his face grows paler and more unslept every morning when he faces himself in the bathroom mirror.

  Imagination’s Chamber has come out at last, and after the endless editorial wrangling and production delays, I suppose it was bound to be something of an anticlimax. However, I had no idea that the type and black-and-white illustrations would look s
o heavily, even smudgily, inked. It’s what Alice invariably calls a ‘coffee book table’, and I never expected it to be considered a rare literary achievement. But the reviews are either gushy and superficial or highbrow and dismissive. One that particularly annoyed me, written in the Tatler by a critic I’d never heard of called Brian Sewell, berated me virulently, almost hysterically, for having ‘omitted’ a long list of seventeenth-century Dutch artists as obscure as himself, implying that if their studios had been included (and the book preferably written by him) the whole venture would have been a great success rather than an abject failure.

  Alice is depressed about the book’s reception but even more by the fact that it has taken us so much time and effort for virtually no financial gain whatsoever, now that the ‘advance’ has been swallowed up by paying for the rights to a large number of photographs. I’m used to having next to no money but she is alarmed by the spectre of poverty, not least because, against my advice, she has handed her entire fortune over to a so-called ‘private investor’ who promised her a very unlikely twelve per cent return on her money. I warned her against him, but Alice was convinced that missing this opportunity would be what she calls ‘cutting off your face to spit out your nose’. Her ‘investor’, who calls himself a ‘Baltic baron’ and has a ‘von’ in his name, lives directly opposite the Elysée Palace, and he has been paying her interest regularly. But now she wants the money back to buy an apartment, and he has been stalling so consistently that she fears she will never see her capital again. I have met the investor, a plump, florid, hand-kissing character who makes a point of turning up at art parties where wealthy people gather, and even in my reduced state I know that he has become too soft and salon-bound not to fear a direct, physical threat. I also realise that if I attempt to get Alice her money back it will show my loyalty at least in this respect. On the first telephone call, when I appeal to his gentlemanly virtues, the investor sounds incredulous; on the second (for which I’ve taken three big shots of whisky that are almost making me throw up), I say that if the money is not paid in full, I will come round and give him the beating of his life; on the third, I call early in the morning, full this time of genuine fury, and say that if the money is not returned by the evening I will lie in wait for him and duff him up in full view of the Elysée guards. The investor sounds terrified this time, because he senses I’m not acting, although he doesn’t of course know that my anger is not so much with him as with the way my whole life is falling slowly and inexorably apart.

  By that afternoon Alice receives a certified cheque for the remainder of her investment, but although the money goes some way to reassuring her, now that she has divorced from her wealthy art historian husband, she remains anxious about her financial future. We discuss plans for her buying an apartment in the Marais so that she no longer has to pay rent on her flat near the Luxembourg Gardens, and the possibility that she acquire a couple of inexpensive rooms to let out to students. We rack our brains for other ways of improving our fortunes. An artist friend who has his studio overlooking the courtyard in Alice’s building has been telling us for some time that he knows of a cache of important Old Master drawings that a former employee of the Hôtel Drouot, who now runs a small family hotel in the French Alps, succeeded in secreting away after the war. Alice is very excited by this idea, particularly since our artist friend says the hotelier has little idea of the value of what sound like drawings by Raphael, Veronese and Holbein. With the artist in tow, we drive to the Alps where the hotelier eventually rummages under his bed and brings out a series of masterpieces imprisoned in imitation period frames under dirty glass. The artist friend has insisted that we don’t ask where the drawings came from or request to take them out of their frames, since the slightest sign of suspicion will frighten the hotelier off. I am supposed to play the over-eager, affluent English art dealer who will spirit them out of the country and sell them anonymously at auction in London. Having spent a feverishly uneasy night under his roof, we make the hotelier a modest offer and carry the masterpieces off – only to find, once we free them from their frames and take a rubber gingerly to an angel’s foot, that they are reproductions. Once again I retrieve the money, but only by threatening the hotelier that otherwise I will name him as the source of these ‘national treasures’ to the French art-export committee.

  These incidents do not alienate me from Alice. On the contrary, they add to the intricate web of sunlit pleasure and abrupt drama that holds us together, even as that web unravels through some force I still don’t understand. And our life still basks for the moment in a mass of picturesque details. There is, for instance, Ahmed, an athletically built, handsome young Pakistani who knocked on my door at Archives one day, with little English and no French, asking for work. I might have given an evasive answer and forgotten about him, but Alice had no one to fix things around her apartment and I felt I could afford occasional help, so Ahmed has provided another link between us, shuttling between whatever tasks we gave him and the friends to whom we recommended his services. Very quickly Ahmed became much more than a Mr Fix-It. If he saw me looking worried about some problem, like the Polonaise’s increasing demands or an unexpectedly large bill, he would put his hand on his heart, bow and vow to protect me, and even though I couldn’t quite see how, I was very touched. At the same time, although barely ten years younger than me, Ahmed felt he could ask my advice as if I were his father. His main concern seemed to involve his index finger until I understood that he had chosen it to stand in for his penis. Ahmed then took me into the dingy loo in the kitchen, shaking his finger as well as his head vigorously – a dumb show he repeated several times before I realised he had a problem passing water. Once I had got him to see a venereal specialist, Ahmed returned like a new man, beaming with confidence and, hand on heart, reiterating his promises to protect me against any enemies I might have.

  I don’t know why my relationship with Alice goes on as if nothing is happening. Even though the initial impulse that brought us together has run its course, we are attached by years of intimacy, shared experience and, of course, habit. I catch myself wondering what I would do, how I would function, without the daily outpouring of my hopes and disappointments over the telephone to Alice: only then do I find out my current bearings in existence and how I should go about living the immediate future. But surely my serial infidelities signal something: that a man in his early forties is not going to spend the rest of his life with a woman about to turn sixty? I think I should end the relationship, which continues, I reflect in frustrated, sardonic moments, the way the beard and nails are supposed to grow on a body after death. Being unfaithful gives me at best the most fleeting satisfaction before it plunges me into guilt-ridden misery, even though, whipped on by crude sexual need like many another poor male, I renew the experience regularly. What more could I possibly want, I cry out (in a grotesque parody of Rilke crying out to the angels), than to have my cake and eat it, be free to have affairs, then come back to my older, wiser companion for confession and comfort? Could it possibly be that, after years of ducking and weaving to avoid any semblance of family life, I might be considering (as if unbeknownst to myself) the idea of settling down and having children?

  Well not right now, certainly, because the Polonaise summoned me to drinks in the bar of the Hôtel Pont Royal (frequented not so long ago by Sartre and Camus, and still the watering hole of the nearby Editions Gallimard) followed by a dinner at Le Voltaire. Neither of these could I afford, although at the latter, while the full horror of the prices for foie gras and poached turbot sank in once we’d been ushered through the velvet curtains into the discreetly lit dining room, I noticed with a stab of envy that my older, better-known colleague and Giacometti expert, James Lord, had the distinction of having an hors d’oeuvre (‘oeuf mayonnaise James’) named after him on the menu. I asked the Polonaise with as much sarcasm as I could muster what we were celebrating. ‘Our baby,’ she said coolly, while I immediately dropped my fish knife and scrabb
led to find it on the floor before it was borne away and replaced by an aloof waiter.

  ‘Our what?’ I said, barely pausing to take a massive pull of the tangy Côtes du Ventoux, the least expensive red wine the Voltaire had on their list.

  ‘Our child, our little one,’ the Polonaise repeated contentedly. ‘The fruit of our union.’

  ‘Would Monsieur dame wish to consider choosing a dessert?’ the same aloof waiter demanded, suddenly towering over us.

  My mind raced. A moment before, I was the put-upon lover dining out beyond his means. Now, in the space of an ‘oeuf mayonnaise James’ and a coquilles Saint-Jacques, I was a future father, a parent-to-be. It was a classic case of what the French, rather callously I had thought until then, called the ‘coup du canapé’ or the ‘sofa trick’, meaning the pregnancy that resulted from the chance dalliance on the family settee. But I had enjoyed not only moments of total abandon in sylvan glades but numerous embraces in other situations she had carefully orchestrated in trains and on beaches, but never in churches, as well as regular poundings in the Polonaise’s own exiguous apartment in the less posh part of the posh seventeenth arrondissement. And she had already drawn up her terms. If the little one were to be born, she and I would need to marry beforehand.