Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Does that imply you’re sick of me?’ the woman next to Adrian enquired, a sharp-faced almost-blonde, with a mask of heavy makeup, which was creasing as she pouted.

  Jane recoiled at Adrian’s whinny of denial. He seemed a different Adrian from the one she had met the morning of the storm – more ingratiating, smarmy. True, he was the host and must keep his guests contented, but she didn’t like the change in him. Christopher had changed, as well – not the intense and serious artist she had got to know these last ten days, but a show-off and a chauvinist, talking far too loudly, dropping names and forks, picking pointless quarrels. She wasn’t sorry when he jumped up from his seat, and John Howard took his place. She had hardly said a word to John as yet, just noted his plain English name, which didn’t fit his exotic foreign looks – jutting powerful eyebrows blacker than his hair; hair so long it hid his ears, trickled over his mulberry velvet jacket.

  Everyone looked elegant, almost overdressed, or perhaps she was just too casual in a plain black skirt of Rowan’s and a stripey sort of jerkin thing which Isobel had found her in what she called her ‘Bits Box’. Christopher hadn’t warned her that the dinner would be formal, or that there’d be so many guests – all chic and cultured socialites, who’d already cantered through a series of intimidating subjects, including the use (or abuse?) of percussion in Lutoslawski’s latest work; the acceleration of Porsches as compared with BMWs; whether fourth-generation computers would eclipse the human brain, and why La Clusaz was a washout as a superior ski resort. She had not contributed anything so far, though it hardly seemed to matter, since everybody else was so busy interrupting, they hadn’t time to notice her own silent ignorance. John now turned to face her, one hand on her chair-seat, as if to prevent her from escaping, even shifting his left thigh so it nudged against her own.

  ‘So what’s your line of business, Rose?’

  ‘I’m Christopher’s assistant.’ It was easier to say now. Not only had she practised it a dozen times this evening, but she also felt more claim to it; had been working really hard for him, if not exactly on the glass, then on scores of other things. She’d also received her first week’s pay – double what he had originally agreed. He’d told her she deserved it, and to regard it as a bonus, which she would get for extra hours.

  ‘Good God! You must be brave,’ John drawled.

  ‘Why?’ she asked him coldly, trying to edge her leg away. She had already defended Christopher from two or three attacks, one from a woman now flirting with him openly, a fashion buyer called Felice, whose cleavage seemed to plunge down to her navel. She wondered how his wife coped, and what she might be feeling if she were sitting at this table – which she should in fact have been, if she hadn’t just departed for New York. She herself had been invited as a stopgap – a second best, a stand-in. The harsh names seemed to fit. Mrs Harville-Shaw would wear designer clothes, drive a BMW (with Lutoslawski on the stereo, and a computer in the dashboard), go skiing every winter in the most fashionable resorts, and recognise what pheasant was, when it was put in front of her.

  She herself had been baffled by the taste, embarrassed by the fiddly bones; had still eaten only half of it, hardly touched the Château Montrose 1969, which the others had all praised, comparing it with wines they’d drunk in a host of different restaurants, countries, continents, as if all they ever did was jet-set from one dinner to the next. And yet they all had high-powered jobs, worked hours as long as Adrian’s. So how did they find the energy to build empires, play the stock market, sit through strident symphonies, lay down vintage wines? Life had never seemed so complex back in Shrepton. Her parents’ friends aimed lower – put their modest savings in the Halifax, chose Scarborough for their holidays or windy Whitley Bay, splashed out on Sainsbury’s Liebfraumilch, if friends came round to dine. She mopped up port and chestnut sauce, felt a sudden longing for her mother’s plain meat-loaf, their sturdy kitchen table with its well-ironed gingham cloth, the bossy clock which tick-tocked from the primrose-painted wall. Adrian’s walls were panelled, hung with frowning portraits, the huge mahogany table laid with heavy silver; everything expensive and oppressive.

  John Howard was still quizzing her – had she been to art school, did she live in Lewes, how had she grown her hair so long, and did she peg it out to dry? She tried to match his jokey tone; relieved when Rupert’s penetrating baritone cut across her own voice, as he hollered down to Christopher at the far end of the table.

  ‘I thought stained glass was dead,’ he said. ‘A lost art, you might say.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s had almost a renaissance since the war, especially in America and Europe. There’ve been some pretty exciting projects in the States – stained glass not just in churches, but in restaurants, airports, private homes and offices. I’m not saying it’s all good – some is bloody terrible – but at least it means the art’s alive and kicking. In Washington, they’ve even got a Space Window, which commemorates man’s landing on the moon, and includes a tiny chip of moon-rock which the astronauts brought back with them, and is meant to be several thousand million years old.’

  ‘What, they’ve got that in a restaurant?’ Rupert interjected.

  ‘No,’ the artist laughed. ‘The Episcopal Cathedral.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound quite the thing for a church.’

  ‘Why not? The theme of the window is actually infinity – the vastness of space and man’s puniness in God’s universe. Anyway, in one sense, the subject’s immaterial. In fact, what’s interesting to me is how non-religious artists like Léger and Matisse created stained-glass windows which are so profoundly spiritual. Léger was an atheist, and he said he hoped that unbelievers would be moved by his work as much as actual church-goers. And Matisse designed his Vence windows with the aim of cheering those who walked into the chapel, hoping they’d feel comforted, relieved of all their burdens. You could say art is our religion now. I remember John Updike remarking to me once that he went to the Museum of Modern Art to pray.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ said Viv, pausing with a parsnip on her fork. ‘Art’s big business. What was it those Japs paid for Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet – eighty million dollars? – which makes even top Picassos look a snip.’

  ‘Eighty-two point five million,’ Christopher corrected. ‘And they described that as – I quote – ‘‘quite cheap’’. It works out as roughly a hundred and forty thousand dollars per square inch.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re buying immortality,’ Claire demurred, dabbing spilt wine off her dress. ‘Which is what religion used to offer.’

  ‘Tell that to the Japanese!’ Viv bit off the top of her roast parsnip, as if decapitating a Jap. ‘They’re buying up the art market, like they’re buying up the world, and investment’s the key word, not bankrupt immortality. The paintings themselves are pretty incidental. They’re just manipulating money, dabbling in a market which is a playground for rich speculators. I don’t know whether you realise, Claire, but sometimes they don’t even see the bloody canvases, except on video. They’re recorded on computer disks and faxed to Tokyo, where the fat cats watch them on TV, like they’re share-reports or something, then phone their bids to London or New York. And they’re all offered instant credit, so that even billionaires can buy their paintings on the never-never, as if a Van Gogh were a three-piece suite, or a Renoir a new dishwasher.’

  ‘You’re completely out of date, Viv,’ John protested. ‘The market has collapsed now and no one’s buying a damned thing.’

  ‘Of course it hasn’t collapsed,’ Rupert contradicted, crumpling up his napkin. ‘It’s simply marking time. Things could be entirely different in another year or two. Great pictures tend to come on to the market when great prices tempt them out. A seller mightn’t bother for a mere ten or fifteen million, but a hundred million will change his mind miraculously.’

  ‘Art’s always been commercial,’ Christopher remarked. ‘I mean, even in medieval times, cathedrals were a status symbol, ci
ties vying with each other to build the biggest and the best. And all the kings and barons showering money on them, in the hope they’d save their souls, which is just another kind of self-concern. But that doesn’t mean they’re not spiritual as well. I mean, take the Abbot Suger. He always comes across to me as something of a vain man, even had himself depicted in one of the new windows he commissioned for his church in 1135, but he was also potty about light and art and beauty. He said he wanted his stained glass to lift man to a higher world, so that the light flooding through the glass would be a symbol of divine light.’

  Jane glanced across at Christopher, surprised. His voice and mood had changed now that he was expounding his own subject – his tone no longer querulous, but passionate, involved. She had never even heard of Abbot Suger, but the artist was still lauding him as a visionary, a mystic, someone who’d experienced the transcendental quality of light. He made him sound a colleague or a friend, yet if he’d been commissioning glass in 1135, then they were divorced from one another by more than eight whole centuries.

  ‘Glass was seen as magical, almost as divine, because it started off as the lowest of the elements, something base like earth or sand, but was transformed to something spiritual, something you looked through, as much as at, and which transmitted light – or God, or Life, or Spirit.’ The artist used his fork to gesture, pointing upwards, as if indicating heaven. ‘They believed it could cause visions, and maybe they were right. Last time I was in Chartres, I had this extraordinary sensation in the cathedral of being transported to another world, like Suger; removed from my own body by the sheer impact of the glass.’

  ‘How much had you been drinking?’ Felice asked with a malicious little grin.

  ‘It was seven in the morning,’ the artist countered sharply. ‘The cathedral had just opened and I was the only person there. The light was filtering through the east end, but it was still basically quite dark inside, with just this amazing glow and dazzle from the glass. I actually found that I was praying, quite naturally and …’

  ‘To the God you don’t believe in,’ Viv objected.

  Christopher nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Why not? Belief is neither here nor there. Art’s as much a mystery as religion is itself. We can’t grasp either one. Inspiration, revelation, visions, mysticism, even creativity – who the hell can really understand them, let alone define them? The artist is a god, in one sense, creating out of nothing.’

  ‘The Almighty Harville-Shaw,’ mocked Viv, snapping a small pheasant bone which she had picked up in her fingers. ‘Who’s also a big hypocrite. Last time we were talking, you were breathing fire and flames about the evils of religion; how it had caused more wars and conflict than almost any other force, and …’

  ‘That’s organised religion,’ the artist interrupted. ‘And I stick to what I said. You can hardly get away from it, for fuck’s sake, if you read the papers or the history books – Catholics gutting Protestants, Hindus bashing Muslims, martyrs charring to a frizzle, crusades and holy wars. I watched a programme just last week about this city in Colombia which has the highest murder rate in the world – some poor sod slashed to ribbons every hour or two. And yet they’re said to be devout religious people, especially the pious hit-men and the ultra-Catholic drug barons, who call their local Virgin the patron saint of drug dealers, and spend their time praying on their knees, when they’re not lobbing bombs or blowing up the courthouses.’

  ‘You can’t take Colombia as typical,’ Anne-Marie put in. ‘It’s a huge problem in itself, and …’

  ‘I’m not. Nothing’s ever ‘‘typical’’. Anyway, the word religion means so many things. It’s like sex, in that respect – one word trying to cover for a whole variety of disparate experiences, and also both have got their darker side – even perverted, you might say. I mean, take the Crucifixion. If that’s not pathological, I don’t know what is – the Place of Skulls, the betrayal for hard cash, the mock purple robes, the thieves and gambling soldiers, the broken legs and bleeding wounds, the hallucinating women mooning over a stinking corpse. All that’s pretty sick, you know, yet it’s the central bloody image of our basic Christian culture – bloody in all senses.’

  ‘Look, I object,’ said Adrian.

  ‘I know you do, old chap. We’ve been over this before, and we’ll never see eye to eye, when you’re a paid-up Christian, and I’m a …’

  ‘Yes, what are you?’ Colin butted in, a skinny man, with lank black hair, but an expensive pin-striped suit. ‘Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘Well, first of all, I loathe all ‘‘-ists’’ and ‘‘-isms’’ – Marxist, Papist, atheist, any bloody ‘‘ist’’ at all. Who can ever be that sure? The older I get, the less I know anything for certain.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ Felice griped. ‘You always seem to be laying down the law.’

  Jane stabbed a roast potato with her knife, angry for the artist. Why did everyone attack him? He had talked to her in private about his beliefs, or lack of them, and she’d been impressed, and even moved. He had made the point that people’s needs and longings went far beyond their ability to meet them; that most fundamental questions stayed unanswered, unresolved; that man invented gods to fill the gap – sometimes loving Father Gods, who then went on to torture them. She knew that even now he was speaking very seriously, tackling crucial subjects, but his tone was somehow wrong. He sounded too cocksure, was hogging all the limelight, not letting other people put their oar in. When they’d talked alone, he had let her see his pain and vulnerability; even admitted that he envied those with faith – the sort of fervent and unquestioning faith which had built the great cathedrals. ‘Faith and hope,’ he’d said with almost longing. ‘The two great gifts you can’t produce to order.’ Then he’d explained that Gothic architecture was not just a simple matter of a change of building-style, but an explosion of the human spirit, a new adventurous outlook, which symbolised escape from the constraints of the Dark Ages. She had remembered that particularly, because it seemed to have some relevance to her own new life and prospects, her own escape from sham parental ties.

  He was so different from her parents, brought such fire and feeling to all the things he cared about; whereas they dismissed most subjects in a prissy phrase or two, especially any dangerous ones, which must be instantly defused. She wished these friends of Adrian could see him as he was, see his other side – that time he’d told her broodingly that maybe the whole universe was sacred – nature and creation not separate from the divine, but expressing and including it. Did she dare remind him, say a word herself? It was surely time she made some contribution, repaid her host for the prawn and lobster soufflé, the exotic winey pheasant. She cleared her throat, clung on to her knife and fork, as if to give herself more weight. ‘Yes, but what about …?’

  ‘Let’s get back to art,’ boomed Rupert from the other end.

  She subsided into silence, didn’t have much choice. She knew even less about art than she did about religion, could only reproduce the views she’d heard from Christopher. She sometimes felt uneasy that art should matter quite so much, when half the world was starving. How could people justify splurging eighty-two million dollars on one single smallish portrait, rather than put an end to famine in the whole of the Third World? Yet who was she to talk? She hadn’t sent a penny to Save the Children or Oxfam. She pushed away her pheasant, seeing in her mind those scraggy haunted kids in the advertisements, holding out their begging-bowls with stick-arms and hopeless eyes. The talk ebbed and flowed around her – galleries and prices, fakes and restorations; art as self-expression, art as self-indulgence, art as therapy, investment, religion, propaganda.

  ‘There’s a link with sex again,’ Christopher insisted. ‘I mean, both art and sexuality take us out of our normal common sphere, shake us up, hurl us a bit higher, give us a small taste of something immortal or ecstatic.’

  ‘You should be in Pseuds’ Corner, Chris,’ Viv exclaimed acerbically. ‘I’ve never heard su
ch crap.’

  ‘The name’s Christopher, in fact.’

  ‘Oh, go to hell! I’ve no patience with these phoney claims for sex. It’s become our new religion now, yet everyone’s quite well aware it’s just an animal and earthy thing.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Christopher. ‘What’s wrong with our society is that we’ve turned sex into an industry, made it purely recreation, which is also a big business. And before that, it was procreation, which is just as bad – or worse. Sex must be more than that – a way of breaking out, not just from ourselves, our usual tight controls, but from other people’s boundaries, experiencing unity, communion.’

  ‘Christopher, you make me sick! You’re so unbearably pretentious. In fact, I’m going to move – I can’t stand any more. Felice, be an angel and swap with me.’

  Jane watched the thin and sallow Viv change places with voluptuous doe-eyed Felice. She and Christopher made an all too handsome pair, offsetting one another; Felice’s brilliant emerald contrasting with the artist’s sombre black. He was dressed all in black tonight; looked elegant, dramatic, in a stylish corduroy suit, black silk shirt, and deep plum velvet tie. Jane glanced from him to Adrian. The two couldn’t be more different – Adrian’s myopic eyes peering wanly through thick glasses, his boring navy suit already creased and seeming slightly big for him, as if he’d nicked it from a messy elder brother. Yet she still felt somehow drawn to him – his air of boyish shyness, the way he ate so sloppily like a nervous scatty kid, spilling gravy down his shirt, dropping flakes of bread-roll in his wine. She wished she could sit next to him, dismiss his dozen guests, chat simply and sincerely on her own.

  The general talk was now on sex and violence, which made her feel uneasy, as well as just embarrassed. She wondered why the two were yoked together. You never said ‘sex and sport’ or ‘sex and meditation’. Was sex often violent, even between apparently loving couples? She’d no idea at all. She glanced from one face to the other, as if trying to find out. Everybody present had been to bed with someone else – everyone but her. That was fairly obvious from their attitudes, their tone. Had it made them different, hurled them a bit higher, as Christopher had claimed, removed them from the normal common sphere?