by WALL, ALAN
Little Eva he obviously loved, and she managed to die of the malignant growths inside her before he was provided with a single serious chance to change his mind.
Olga, the Russian ballet virgin, was the first one he had to marry to possess. Even in the portraits he painted of her, many in the style of Ingres, you can see what she was: an effigy of proprietorial self-importance. She actually managed to turn Picasso into a stiff, self-preening bourgeois, though fortunately not for ever.
Dora Maar, that chameleon soul who was greatly gifted herself, let her identity be made over from profligate anguish to the dedicated anguish of being Pablo's lover and she never recovered. Picasso called her the most convenient woman he'd ever met – if you wanted her to be a dog, she was a dog, if a bird, a bird, if a cloud, well then a cloud. She could even be an abstract notion or a year gone by or a thunderstorm. She would scream at him in her rages, only to beg forgiveness afterwards and say she would once more be anything, anyone, anywhere he chose to specify. She had stepped straight out of Ovid, ready to change shape into tree or wind, except that she didn't shift forms to escape a god, but to embrace one, to bring him back into her mind and flesh, to have him home again inside her thoughts, between her legs. Later, long after Pablo had gone, she returned to the practice of Catholicism. Her observance by the end of her life was as strict as a nun's. The little god from Spain had been replaced by the big one from the sky.
Marie-Therese Walter was no more than a schoolgirl when he met her. She adored him. He didn't so much re-create as create her. For years his painting rejoiced in the curvature of woman-hood and the bright colours of fecundity. It was an incestuous relationship with a new little sister. He left her but she never left him. Even after he'd finished with her he remained the centre of her life till the end of her days. Not long after he died she committed suicide by taking poison. And she was the figure in so many of the etchings from the Vollard Suite.
Francoise Gilot was the only one who actually walked out on him. That was a first and he made sure there was no repeat performance.
Then the faithful Jacqueline saw him through to the end. Change a woman, change a life. That seemed to be Picasso's motto. The question now was this: had this happened to Henry too? In some ways, it undoubtedly had. Now: was it about to happen again? Break the rules, Henry. There was no one in the gallery. He went through to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Nuits St George. He wanted something decent to help him think. 12.30 is in any case so close to one o'clock as makes no difference.
His insouciant account of his marriages in fact covered several wounds, as Sylvie had suspected. His first marriage drew to a conclusion with great rapidity when it became evident to Henry that his wife had been conducting an affair for over a year with one of her business partners, a much neater and richer man than Henry had been at the time. Or was now, or ever would be, if it came to that. He could still remember how he had lain awake in his bed and raged, cuckold hours transmuting into eunuch days. He felt as though he had been living in the harem of another man's pleasures. By then, the only thing unveiled for him each night was the spectre of his own humiliation. Laura had simply come and gone, leaving him sore in the process, but Eleanor. Poor Eleanor. As he sipped at his premature glass of wine, he turned the pages of his address book until he found Sylvie's number at the Institute. He had her mobile too but he didn't want to talk to her now, only to leave a message.
'This is the minotaur. Now you know that I won't eat you, will you be coming back again before long? I've been tidying the labyrinth in anticipation.'
As the call was being recorded at the Institute, it was picked up by Hamish Flyte on his RECE monitoring system. He grabbed the phone immediately and dialled I47I before another call could come in. He then phoned the number provided.
'Riverside Gallery. How may I help you?' Hamish now adopted his wheedling tone.
'Sorry. So sorry. Could I just ask who I'm speaking to?'
'Henry Allardyce.'
'Now I am getting confused. Would there be anyone else at the gallery?'
'No, I'm the only one here.'
'Thank you. I think I must definitely have got a wrong number.' He put down the phone and made a note of Henry's name.
When he heard the keys clinking against Sylvie's door later in the afternoon, he quickly opened his own.
'Hello there. What a lovely outfit. Delightful little black skirt, Sylvie. You look as though you're on your way to a date; or coming back from one, perhaps. How's your work in the labyrinth going?'
'In the labyrinth, Hamish? You mean on the labyrinth, presumably.' She was laughing. Silly little man.
'Oh, do I.'
She didn't have time to listen to her messages, but gathered together her notes and went straight to the lecture theatre. It was full. That was gratifying. Lionel fixed his eyes on her legs, where they remained for the following fifty minutes.
'I want to start with a quote from the poet W B. Yeats. He is thinking of the goings-on in seances, in which he was very interested. The emanation of spirits. Ectoplasm. Here's what he says: "If photographs that I saw handed round in Paris thirty years ago can be repeated and mental images photographed, the distinction that Berkeley drew between what man creates and what God creates will have broken down." Now just think about this for a moment. Photographs are going to abolish the distinction between what man creates and what God creates. Photographs. The afterlife of images. Conan Doyle had already become convinced of something similar, when he believed those photographs of the Cottingley Fairies. They were fakes, of course, but they fooled the creator of Sherlock
Holmes, that fool-proof detective. Why such an extraordinary dependence on the photograph? Might it be because of our distrust of the human imagination? Might it be because we wish to make memory scientific, and therefore forensically irrefutable? Might it be because we have so come to distrust our own eyes that we wish only to trust the cyclopean eye of our recording lenses? That way we can separate the image from all subjectivity. This would explain a great deal of the modern cult of celebrity, since only those who spend enough time before the cyclopean eye can be said to be truly alive. Until you are sufficiently photographed, you haven't even been born. This might be one explanation why people are prepared to abandon all their dignity for the sake of ten minutes on a television programme. Because they have now been made immortal in an image. We're all Egyptian pharaohs now. The painted food on our walls is an image, so it can never rot. That's the origin of the still life. Anyway, next week we are going to examine photographs from the cave at Lascaux. Let's see if we can work out how every single image appears to have been painted by Picasso.'
She had at some point, without thinking, moved around to the front of the table and sat down on it, crossing her legs. She always did this. But she didn't usually wear the short black skirt and stockings she'd chosen for Henry the previous night. Alison came up to her afterwards with a wary smile – she was merely fulfilling the University's peer-review requirements by attending the lecture in the first place.
'Decided to promote your talks amongst the male student body, I see, Sylvie?'
'Why?'
'It's just, with that skirt, if a chap had been in the right place this evening, he could have caught the whites of your thighs above the stocking-tops. I did.'
'Oh shit.'
'Lionel's gone off in search of para-medical attention. Or maybe just a bar. I've been told that alcohol in sufficient quantities produces detumescence.'
Only when she got back to her room did she listen finally to the message from Henry. Minotaur. It struck her what Hamish had said earlier. In the labyrinth. Coming to or from a date. There had been a rumour for some time that Hamish listened in on everyone's calls, keeping personal files on the lot of them. This caused some merriment; some irritation. Nobody was sure if it was legal under the new European legislation. She felt no merriment at all, but considerable irritation. She walked across the corridor to his room and, after the m
ost perfunctory of knocks, walked in.
'Hamish, have you been listening to my calls?'
'I have to monitor all calls to the Institute; it's done on a strictly one-in-X random-selection principle.'
'Well, I'd appreciate it if, in future, one-in-X is someone else and not me. Because I don't like it.'
'Goodness. You do seem to be making a habit of taking the bull by the horns at the moment.'
'Not sure about that, Hamish. But I've always been very good at taking the Jock by the jockstrap. And I once saw a farm demonstration: how to turn a bull into a bullock. So watch it.'
Then as she was turning away, he said this: 'Oh, by the way.
Your husband phoned this morning. He wondered if you might be here, since you apparently weren't there. Sadly not, I told him. I had no idea of your whereabouts, of course, any more than he did.'
Sylvie drove through the Birkenhead Tunnel in a state of chilled exasperation. No graffiti down here, she noticed. Even the taggers weren't prepared to endure so much carbon monoxide for their urban art. She put on the cassette that her best student had given her the day before. Paul Darcy. Through the Concrete Corridors. 'He's into some of the same things you are,' the student had said. She tried to concentrate on the music and ignore the hundred thousand tons of water thrashing about above her.
Dreams and speculations, fragments washed up by the waves
Ruins under mountains and ancient treasures deep in caves
I stepped into your labyrinth, I heard the monster roar
But a doctor in a white coat with a clipboard led me gently to the door
And when you arrived with a pen-torch and a smile on your face
Bringing all the medicine I'd need for my stay in this place
Through the concrete corridors, your smiling words were feathery and slight
When the blindfold came off, darkness flashed not light.
Another minotaur, then. Blinded by passion and bewilderment. But she couldn't concentrate, and switched over to the news instead. More slaughter in the caverns there. Bombs going off in the mountains. When she arrived back she heard the sound of one of Johnny and Owen's films. She walked across to the set and switched the sound off.
'Why did you phone the Institute this morning?'
'To find out where you were ... how you were.'
'How very solicitous. You bugger off to Llandudno and then start snooping around after me.'
'I wasn't snooping. Anyway, where were you?'
'With a friend.'
'Have a name, this friend?
'I don't owe you anything, Owen. I'm not saying you owe me anything either, but I definitely don't owe you anything.'
'Do you want a coffee?'
'Yes, please. I'll go have a shower and get changed.'
'I like the get-up, to be honest. Only hope your friend did.' Then he went to the kitchen. She turned and looked at the silent images on the screen. Tom posters on a decaying wall. Balls of dead grass blowing down the street. A child crouched beside a blown-up truck, his face a miniature diagram of the world's desolation.
'Do you want me to sleep in the other room again?'
'Yes please.'
But he came to bed anyway, half an hour after her. Lay beside her. Placed a hand on her breast.
'No.'
'It was so warm the other night.'
'So warm you went to Llandudno the following day. It had been a long time before that, Owen. Given everything that had happened. Maybe you haven't remembered it all yet. Alex, I mean.'
He hadn't removed his hand; neither had she.
'I was just trying to help you remember who you were. So much of sex is politeness, remember. A woman in one of your scripts says that.'
Only minutes before falling asleep did she remember Henry.
She hadn't phoned him back. He'd survive the night though, wouldn't he?
Earth, Water, Fire and Air
Alex read the passage from The One True Elemental for the fourth time and told herself that the pain in her gut was merely the sound of earthly grossness leaving. So much corruption for so long had rotted the invisible conduits and made them flesh-like in weightiness and sloth. She was being pulled down temporarily towards what Lady Pneuma called the dark plumbing of sad bodies, the potbellies, the gross tongues, those with soulless skins and iron brains. The pain was the low dirge of lament of a defeated army stumbling home. Soon enough she would hit the wall of elation, that resurrection into the region of Mary's colour, the azure of the abandonment of the fleshly. Pneuma had described it so beautifully. It would soon be hers. Only for now the pain, the sweats, the cramps and the cold. Such a terrible cold. She had never felt so shiveringly cold; the soul itself seemed to shiver. Shaking off the filth of its imprisonment. That was the dark matter leaving.
She could still just manage to turn around and see the image of Pneuma, a vague vignette, framed in a white-heart plastic frame, redolent of sainthood. It made her look considerably thinner than she actually was these days, but her skin was still lit from the light within. And she also saw Owen Treadle, whom she did not choose to see at all. His ectoplasmic face was grinning, pursuing her across space and time. 'Go on, you can do it. It's not really happening, Alex. This is acting, for God's sake.' But it was really happening, wasn't it? Even something only made to be re-played again and again on film still had to happen. Images could not have an afterlife unless they had a life first. She passed out then.
*
Lady Pneuma now claimed one hundred thousand members worldwide. There was no way of affirming or disproving this statement, since if she kept any records, she had not as yet made them available to anyone else. The Inland Revenue in Britain and the IRS in the States were both beginning to make some interested murmurs about all this. But Pneuma, while seemingly living at the Claymore for one half of the year, and the New York Waldorf for the other, remained elusive. Her communications with the world were carefully controlled. A DVD (Alex had it in her bag, but there was no way of playing it in the electricity-free bothie); occasional booklets; hermetic appearances on television, very infrequent, and controlled entirely by the Delta Foundation. Her followers had to turn back to the compacted wisdom brought together in the pages of The One True Elemental. There they could find it all. All that she had discovered. All she had endured. Everything she had now transcended.
Alex was clutching her copy, even as she sank into unconsciousness. Her own copy was signed; or at least the words Lady Pneuma had been imprinted on its title-page in some manner. A few sceptical journalists who had set off in pursuit of the enigmatic lady were far from convinced that she spent her days signing books for her numerous disciples. Alex had the special copy because, after paying three hundred pounds to become an associate member, she had then spent a further four hundred to become a full initiate. This accorded her privileges, like the signed book, in which she had read – enchantingly – that the urethra had only become so engrossed and enfleshed at a late stage in female evolution. Before that it had been a translucent passageway through which light could travel freely. This had been the burden of the myth of Zeus and Danae: though encased in her tower of flesh, Danae was penetrated by the luminous shower of gold. In other words, the riches of the world of light had overcome all obstacles and seeded the womb of the future. So what did gods live on and in? Air, of course. Like Pneuma herself.
Alex had also been entitled as a full initiate to personal communication with Lady Pneuma; this prospect had been what had prompted her to spend the extra money. In her desperation before leaving to head north the month before, she had phoned and phoned. Day after day after day. Over a hundred times. But it was always the same recorded message she found herself listening to.
'This is Lady Pneuma. You are now a full initiate of the Delta Foundation, which has found the path of escape from a life of bodily entrapment. We are free spirits who live only on what the spirit offers. If you have not made the full journey yet, you must understand that you now
have the means to do so. I have eaten nothing but air for ten years. Take a look at my pictures ...’
The Second Interval
Henry Allardyce looked in the mirror. He couldn't really blame Sylvie for not phoning back; he wouldn't have phoned himself back, if he'd been a woman. God, look at yourself, Allardyce. Your hair needs cutting. You haven't bothered shaving. Your shirt collar is frayed. Your doctor says your blood-pressure is always on the up and up. Where's it all going to end?
Phttt, he thought. I'll go like that. Run out of air one day like a dead balloon. Phttt. Shrivelled skin on the pavement where the boots go hurrying by. One great phttt, and a mild, baffled obit in the local paper. Heading for flame and ashes, and maybe a little earthenware vase with a name inscribed and two dates: from this terminus to that one. A life. The exit from the womb and the entry to the grave. And as for the rest, the civic amenity site or, as we used to say when syllables were rationed during the war, the tip. Not my Picassos though; not my minotaurs. No one will be chucking those away. And, pray, what do you do about it all, sir? Pour yourself another glass of wine and listen to Thelonius Monk, why don't you?
Monk was a particular favourite of Henry's, who liked a great deal of modern jazz before it decided to abandon the tune entirely, though he had been told it had recently been returning home to it. Monk's version of Nice Work if you Can Get It was plinking and plonking through the gallery at the moment, gathering up contingencies as it went and transmuting each one into own weird causality. Henry poured himself a glass of red. French vin de table. Nothing fancy. Mustn't spend too much this month. Then the bell rang to indicate that someone had entered. Henry took a stern swig of his glass, adopted an expression of entirely insincere affability, and walked through to the main room. It was Bernard Trasker, MBE and Mrs Bernard Trasker, MBE by gender proxy and adoption. Henry could never think of them as anything other than this, since Bernard seldom let an opportunity pass of telling everyone about the existence of his gong. It was all over his letterhead, his compliment slips. Even, Henry suspected, his notes to the milkman. Probably had it embroidered on his socks. Should he ever omit to mention the honour, his wife would make good the lacuna. Her role as dutiful companion to a distinguished lifelong civil servant surely deserved some sort of recognition from the world. Bernard occasionally bought paintings for his fine old house up on the hill. Whatever he bought, his wife would disapprove of. She was looking with considerable disapproval now at the Nolan portrait of Rimbaud, which Bernard had been examining for the sixth or seventh time. Evidently pondering.