by Patrick Gale
‘Beer would be lovely.’ Jake looked around him, letting Faber lift his coat from his shoulders. The rain had drenched it in the short sprint from car to door. He had not seen Faber’s studio home since coming there to collect Candida’s portrait several years ago. In those days it was still unconverted. ‘It’s changed here,’ he called after Faber who was finding beer in the kitchen. The gallery had been a kind of junk yard of canvasses, old frames, packing-cases and chipped mirrors. There had been a mattress draped in tangled bedding in one corner and no apparent sign of a bathroom. But then, in those days, Jake reflected, he and Candida had been living in a rented flat where passing trains shook the bathwater.
‘So,’ said Faber, coming from the kitchen and handing him a chilly glass of bitter. The first gulp hurt Jake’s stomach. He had eaten nothing since breakfast but a quail’s egg sandwich. ‘You want to buy another painting.’
‘Not just one. Several,’ said Jake, ‘only it’s not me who’s buying them – I wish it was. It’s for the firm’s collection. Just because Candida and I have made a few lucky buys in the past, they seem to think I’m an expert. I’ve become their sort of unofficial buyer.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘Yes, quite. Shopping with someone else’s money.’
Faber gestured for Jake to sit on a sofa.
‘Please,’ he said.
Jake sat down beside a headless skeleton that was already reclining. Then he rose to pull something out from underneath him. It was a jersey Robin had borrowed from him eight years ago, a fisherman’s jersey, speckled black and white. He sat down again abruptly.
‘Have you hurt your leg?’ Faber asked.
Jake tried to laugh it off.
‘Stupid collision on the squash court,’ he said. ‘Playing doubles.’ He rubbed his bruises through his trousers and felt shame. Candida’s kicks the other evening had drawn blood.
Faber was dragging a large canvas across the room to lean against an easel. Jake was appalled. Faber tugged out three slightly smaller ones and ranged them around the large one like a grotesque altarpiece. Jake was appalled still further. The largest and two of the others showed wretched tramps, barely female, sitting massively on a table top. Jake recognised the table as the one where Faber had evidently eaten lunch earlier. Another painting was a nude study of a chubby youth with a grin and flaming red hair.
‘He works in the butchers,’ Faber explained, pointing to the still bloody cleaver in the youth’s hand.
‘Stunning,’ said Jake and hurt his stomach with more beer. Was this the onset of an ulcer?
‘And then there are these,’ said Faber, lifting six canvasses one by one from a corner, placing them in a line along the other side of the room so that Jake had to stand to see them. ‘I did these in the Spring over at Tooting Lido. Do you ever go there? No, I don’t suppose you do.’
‘Where? Tooting? No. I’m afraid we don’t. Candida wants to build a pool of our own. I don’t think the neighbours will approve much, though.’
Seeing that Faber had finished arranging the paintings, Jake subsided and examined them respectfully. He saw three more women and three men, all of them overweight, over fifty or both. Lit by warm spring sunshine, they were pictured in detail one could almost touch. Each male painting had a brightly-coloured changing-room door as its backdrop while the women were painted against various views of an aeration fountain in swimming-pool blue. Two of the women (and one old man) wore rubber bathing-caps, while the third and oldest of them stood with her hands combing out her hair into a damp white mane. Her bathing-cap discarded at her feet, she looked utterly mad.
Jake was aghast. ‘Incredible,’ he said. Faber had walked around to look at them too. He showed mercy enough not to ask whether or not Jake liked them. ‘Which are your favourites?’
‘Oh,’ said Faber, ‘I’m always most interested in what I’m working on at the moment. By the time it’s finished, something else has usually started bubbling up. Projects often overlap. I’ll be at the photograph and sketch stage for one before another is all painted out.’
‘Do you often use photographs?’
‘Nearly always, yes. The lido set were photos. So was Henry.’
‘Henry?’
‘The butcher’s apprentice. He didn’t have much time.’
‘Ah,’ said Jake and looked back at Henry who smiled lewdly back at him and wobbled his cleaver suggestively. This was much harder than Jake had at first imagined. ‘And are they all for sale?’ he asked.
‘All except Henry. An interested party from the Burden Friday gallery has already reserved him. God knows where they’ll manage to hang him.’ Faber laughed.
Relieved that this was permissible, Jake laughed too. He wandered over to the easel, trying not to limp.
‘Can I see the work-in-progress?’ he asked. ‘The latest favourite?’
‘Please do.’
Jake looked at the near-finished painting of Iras and Robin and was strangely moved to anger.
‘What are they doing?’ he asked quietly.
‘She’s teaching Robin to read braille. He’s coming on quite well. Better than I ever did. I had to give up because shutting my eyes for long makes me too nervous.’
Jake finished his beer. Faber promptly removed his glass to fill it again. Jake looked on. One of Robin’s hands was gently fingering the page before him, the other was reaching out towards Iras across the sunny table-top as though she could somehow hand him understanding the way she might pass the pepper.
‘What would you ask for this one?’ Jake asked.
‘Not for sale,’ Faber called from the fridge. ‘If you’re talking about the one I think you are.’
‘What have they gone to hear?’ Jake went on after a moment.
‘Bartok, I think,’ said Faber, coming back and giving Jake a second beer.
‘Thanks,’ Jake muttered.
‘And Beethoven and then there was Britten to start with. Or Bax, perhaps. Robin was joking about how the only thing which seemed to hold the programme together was the names beginning with B.’
Jake walked back to the Lido Group, where he stood and drank some beer.
‘I want you to sell me the whole lot, excluding Henry, of course,’ he said at last and named a figure that would have the company accountants demanding an explanation. Faber seemed surprised. Perhaps he was not doing as well as Candida pretended.
‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘that’s very generous of you but, as I say, Robin and Iras aren’t for sale.’
‘You must realise,’ said Jake, ‘how our buying all your extant available work for the collection will raise its market value. My secretary’s already talked to your agent and to several galleries so I know we’d be the first to make such a confident gesture.’
‘Wonderfully confident,’ said Faber.
‘If you’re not convinced, we can let you have a breakdown of how the artists we’ve bought have taken off. Not that you need to take off much further …’ he added.
‘Wonderfully confident,’ Faber repeated, setting down his drink and ruffling his hair in what Jake hoped was indecision, ‘almost foolhardy, and I know you’d be buying more than the firm told you to, which would be sweet of you, but as I say this one isn’t for sale.’ Jake waited. ‘This is family,’ Faber stressed.
‘You’ll go off it when the next idea starts “bubbling up”,’ Jake suggested.
‘No, I won’t. This one’s finished and I still love it.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘It is. I left it on the easel to enjoy.’
Jake raised his bid by a quarter, making rapid calculations and trying to visualise his latest bank statement.
‘No,’ laughed Faber, weakly adding, ‘I said it’s not for sale.’
Jake raised his bid by another quarter. Faber gasped and flopped down on the sofa.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘After all that’s happened?’
Jake repeated the bid. He was buying with his own money now.
‘You can always do more’, he said. ‘You could do that one again standing on your head.’
Faber scoffed, unable to meet Jake’s eye.
‘Please,’ said Jake, more a command than a request.
Faber continued to sit. Unable to protest with words now he merely shook his head slowly. Jake sat at the dining-table and wrote the cheque for his share of the purchase. At the soft rasp of it tearing from the stub Faber sat up.
‘Just don’t take it right away, OK?’ he said.
‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll ring you about packing and transport next week.’ He left the cheque on the gnarled, crumb-scattered wood where the filthy women had crouched. He found his coat himself.
Thirty-Five
Robin knew it was his own fault, for snooping. He still scarcely knew Faber. He was fast becoming familiar with every memorable inch of Faber’s body but something in him, the Bluebeard’s wife he supposed, had to know more. Marcus Carling’s death started it, suddenly filling their temple with memories and reminders of Faber’s past of which Robin, naturally, had been quite unaware. Faber only told him the minimum; he told him everything, that is, but only the facts. Overnight a corpse had moved in to share the marriage bed and now Robin’s dreams were troubled. Marcus’s funeral seemed to have laid a painful ghost and since then Faber had been cheerful as ever but from time to time as they embraced Robin felt him look over his shoulder at the past. So, Robin had taken to snooping. He found several lovingly annotated photograph albums and snatched compulsive painful minutes with Faber’s sunlit memories, scouring the pages for proof of handsome intimacies before his own, and finding all too many.
‘Who was Jack?’ He would ask. ‘Tell me about Fabrizio. Who exactly was this Ellen Mae?’
Blithely, Faber would tell him, though just the facts; location of holidays, approximate lengths of affairs. He neither hinted at the relative depths of his emotional involvement in these emotional excursions nor sought to distinguish sunny fling from tortured passion, and this seeming failure to take his past seriously, increased Robin’s discomfort.
Last week is now your past, as well, Robin felt like telling him, and the week before that, and you spent them both with me.
This morning lust had woken him early but he couldn’t rouse Faber.
‘You just need to pee,’ Faber told him. ‘It happens to everyone. Go and pee then come back to sleep. It’s only six-thirty.’
But Robin didn’t need to pee and he couldn’t bear lying there watching Faber sleep without him, so he got up and went snooping. He found a recent letter from Ellen Mae, who Faber had said meant so little. Ellen Mae seemed to think she meant quite a lot. She wrote to Faber from darkest California. Ten pages – twenty sides – of wild, angry writing about how, ever since he’d gone, she couldn’t seem to stop having babies without taking to the bottle. She complained that she gave so much of herself and Faber never sent her more in return than two-phrase postcards which she dismissed as ‘sentimental haiku’.
Then Robin found a cheque, dated yesterday, worth an awe-inspiring sum and signed Jake Browne. It was from an unusual London bank and reminded him of the time when Jake was the rich grammar school friend who bought endless treats for him and Candida and drove them anywhere they liked in his fast car.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, tossing it onto the bed.
‘Nothing,’ said Faber. ‘Come back to bed.’
‘Why is Jake Browne writing you obscenely large cheques?’
Faber groaned and rolled over to push his face into the pillow. He muttered something like ‘Later.’
‘Now!’ Robin said and tugged hard on his shoulder. Faber slapped his hand away and turned round.
‘He’s bought a whole load of paintings for his firm’s art collection. Now can I go to sleep?’
‘No. Why didn’t you tell me last night?’
‘You two came back late and I was busy getting Iras off to bed. I forgot.’
‘You don’t forget a sum like this.’
‘That’s only the deposit,’ Faber muttered, rubbing his eyes and frowning. ‘Try timesing it by six.’
‘What?’
‘Or maybe seven. I haven’t really worked it out.’
‘Which did he buy?’
‘The lot.’
‘I thought Henry was sold already.’
‘The lot except Henry.’
‘And the one of me and Iras.’
‘No. He bought that. He bought that especially. I told him it wasn’t for sale.’
‘But you love that one. I love that one. It’s ours. Why did you sell it?’
‘How often does someone offer you seven cheques like that for something you can do without shaving or putting on a suit and tie?’
‘Faber, that’s disgusting.’ Robin sat on his pillows beside him. ‘From him, of all people. I’m going to tear this up.’
Faber grabbed Robin’s wrist with one hand and snatched the cheque with the other.
‘Don’t you bloody dare!’ he said.
‘But you don’t need money,’ Robin told him. ‘No one does. Not that much. What would you spend it on?’
For a moment Faber stared at him as though Robin were out of his mind then he jumped up, pulled his dressing-gown around him and headed out onto the landing.
‘I’ll show you,’ he said.
Downstairs he tugged open the top drawer of his desk and took out a handful of papers and letters. Robin had never seen him so angry before.
‘Electricity,’ Faber said. ‘Gas. Telephone. Water. Rates. And here, look, my mortgage book. Look at the size of the monthly payments. Iras’s school fees. Her clothes. My clothes. Our food – we’re feeding for three now, don’t forget. Bus passes. Tube passes. Bike repairs. Bottles of wine when people ask us out. Bottles of wine and more food when we have to ask them back. Cheque stubs. Just look at them. Have you any idea at all what it costs to “simply be”, as you so quaintly put it? To ride on buses all day, eat in cafés, visit galleries and go to the cinema? Look at this notebook. I keep a record of the household accounts here. Look how much it was there. OK? Now look how much it was there, after two weeks of you.’
‘But … look, I can give you money. I’m always offering and you always say no because I don’t work.’
‘It’s your father’s money. It’s not yours to give. Besides, you need every penny for your fucking bus journeys across London and back.’
‘But …’
‘And what would you give your blessed beggars if I docked your pocket-money?’
‘Well …’
‘And then there’s Iras. Iras never used to cost me anything. Two or three months after the adoption papers came through I got a letter from some solicitors saying that they acted for her parents. They were busy, wealthy people, the solicitor said, who could not have given Iras the time she so obviously needed, poor thing. They knew they were not meant to contact me in person and that Iras should never meet them but now that she had found a home they were keen to support her anonymously. I was given no option. Every month money piled into a special bank account in Iras’s name. When I found this place and took on the mortgage the solicitor seemed to know all about it and, before I’d been here a week, the payments into Iras’s account doubled “to cover her share of board and lodging”. Well, I wasn’t going to complain. She was their flesh-and-blood daughter, and if they felt guilty for abandoning her and wanted to pay her way that was fine. If I wasn’t having to worry about milk bills it would be that much easier to give her a happy home.’
‘So what’s the problem? Faber, why are you so upset?’
‘This is the problem. Here. Look.’ He held out a bank statement. ‘Her special account. Look. The payments ground to a halt just here. Right after when I met you. No help with the mortgage, no help for her school fees. Have you any idea how much that place costs? She’s not just any blind kid, she’s a hyper-intelligent blind kid which means paying for a hyper-intelligent tutor who can keep up with her. And
as if that wasn’t enough, there’s you deciding that you want to be trained to teach in blind school.’
‘I told you. I can get a grant. Maybe.’
‘But you still need money. It doesn’t cover everything. Grants, if you’re lucky enough to get them, cover less and less.’
‘Never mind that now.’
‘I do mind. It’s important. It’s your future.’
‘Well, never mind it now. What about these payments? Didn’t you try her parents’ solicitors?’
‘Of course I did. I rang them straight up and asked what the hell was going on. Had the parents died, I said, and if so, why hadn’t I been informed? They had not died, the solicitors said, but they were unable to disclose any further information.’
Just then Iras left her room in her nightdress and came yawning downstairs.
‘Hi, honey,’ said Faber. ‘Did we wake you?’
‘I’d been up for ages,’ she lied. ‘Morning, Robin,’
‘Morning, Iras.’
She shut the bathroom door and soon they heard taps being turned on.
‘What about Marcus?’ asked Robin.
‘What about him?’
‘Well, surely … Now that he’s died. I mean, he was your father.’
‘Marcus was in hospital for nearly a year. Or maybe more than that. He was certainly ill for longer. I hadn’t seen him for years before that and I didn’t visit him once after he fell sick. Hardly the action of the faithful son who gets remembered in wills. He won’t have left me a sou. He’s wasted quite enough on me already.’ Faber paused. ‘Damn!’ he snapped.
‘What is it?’
‘Look.’ He pointed to the tears that were already springing from his eyes.
Thirty-Six
Jake and Candida were making love at three in the morning and he, for one, was astonished. He had been woken by Perdita. He went to feed her and had a brief chat with Tanya, the super-efficient new nanny who had woken too and fairly raced him to the feeding bottle. When he sunk back into bed Candida, wide awake, had reached out for him.
He had always enjoyed mid-sleep sex. He like the way it uncoiled seamlessly from the sleep on either side of it, free of social or domestic preliminaries. The darkness was somehow darker and, to be honest, one’s partner somehow less one’s partner. Candida, however, had taken to forbidding sex in the middle of any but Friday or Saturday nights because her working days began at dawn. The cameras, she claimed, highlit a wrinkle for every minute of sleep lost.