by A L McCann
“My behaviour was pretty dreadful, wasn’t it?” Paul said sheepishly.
“Nothing that won’t blow over.”
“It was pretty dreadful where you were concerned as well.”
“I can handle myself, Paul.”
They were silent for a moment, both watching the pretty Irish barmaid serving a bloke at the other end of the bar.
“Are you still carrying a flame for Ondine?” Paul asked.
“Of course not,” said Hamish as nonchalantly as he could. “But I didn’t know that you were.”
“Steady there, old man. That would be Blutschande, as they say in the old country.”
Paul and Ondine had once looked up the word, as if they were looking for a code that would contain the excitement of their clandestine affections.
“Paul, she’s going to have to get married sooner or later. If not to Ralph Matthews, then to someone else.”
Paul wondered how much Hamish really knew. He looked at him pensively, blowing a swirl of cigarette smoke out over the bar, turning over in his mind the fact that they had known each other virtually their whole lives, shared the same fairytales and probably dreamt the same dreams.
“You’ve always loved Ondine, Hamish,” Paul said. “I’ll bet, ten to one, that your poem has some sort of murky connection to her, even if it might be invisible to everyone else.”
“Perhaps you’re hoping that I’ll challenge Ralph Matthews to a duel or something. Is that it?”
“He’d probably do us both without thinking twice. No. I wouldn’t be worried about him. Ondine won’t look twice at such a philistine.”
“But she will marry eventually.”
“Bullshit. Marriage is a plot designed by the weak to enslave the strong. If you’re awake to it you can stand well away. Ondine sees things too clearly to fall into the clutches of some nobody pleading that he loves her, that he’ll cherish her until death do them part. You know my sister, Hamish. She’s highly developed. None of that nonsense about child rearing and self-sacrifice for the good of the nation. None of that rot about the ‘mood of the land’. She can see the end, the world in flames, and looks on without flinching.”
Paul had worked himself up and drew heavily on the cigarette to calm himself.
Hamish, as if in obedience to a childish reflex, was on the verge of saying something glib at Paul’s extravagant image of his sister, but the truth of it was that it engrossed him. He knew he couldn’t be derisive about it without being false to himself. He loved Ondine, he realised, exactly for the quality that Paul had summed up as only one caught in the grips of obsession could. The thought of the fire in her dreams, the world reduced to burning rubble, left him almost breathless. Isn’t that what Albert had tried to write about as well? The forsaken creatures of his fevered imagination, the filthy streets of the city, the labyrinth of death and desire. Hamish knew it all by heart. They were all fellow travellers in some futile quest for an intensity that defied mere being. It wasn’t love, it was fire. Maybe that’s why Albert killed himself, he thought. For the second time, Hamish was on the verge of saying something about the notebooks.
“But what about your poem? The bushman’s bible, eh?” said Paul, trying to resume some semblance of normality.
“I sent them five poems, but they didn’t accept any of them,” Hamish said, relieved to be coming clean. “Too self-consciously romantic. Who the hell would have thought it from a bloke who works in a hospital cleaning up shit and disposing of corpses? They also said something about my ‘Grecian’ posing, and advised me not to become a master of the second-hand. On the whole, you could safely say I was torn to shreds.”
Paul breathed deeply. He didn’t need to ask Hamish why he lied about the poem. The two of them drank and smoked until closing time, content in the silences of each other’s company, each unwilling to disturb the promise of empathy and understanding they contained. They had, after all, known each other since they were children and for the moment each knew about the other all he needed to know.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A few weeks after the catastrophe with Ralph Matthews, something took place in the Gallery School that was unprecedented. A man in his fifties appeared in the painting studio and proceeded to inspect the canvases. He cut a curious figure, with his smooth, bald head and blubbery features. He wore a monocle, which magnified his eye, and a cloak, which he swirled around with dramatic effect as he sailed through the room scrutinising one inept painting after another. Lindsay Bannister greeted him by asking, suspiciously, whether he could be of any help.
“My name is Reuben Gines,” the man said in a slight European accent, shaking Bannister’s hand. “I believe we met in Antwerp.”
“Quite possibly,” Bannister replied, dazzled by the oddity of the fellow before him. “I’ve certainly been there.”
“I won’t waste your time,” the man said. “I’ve come to talk to one of your protégés.”
“One of mine?” Bannister asked. The students in the studio were by this time all ears, wondering what surprise the cloaked man was about to spring.
“I’m representing a private collector, Sir, who has instructed me to offer twenty pounds to Mr Walters in exchange for…” The man paused, looking around him, searching out the exact piece of work.
“Mr Walters is this way,” Bannister said in disbelief.
Paul shook the man’s hand, and no sooner had he done so than Gines seized upon the garishly-coloured figure that Bannister himself had criticised so publicly.
“For this you’ll pay twenty pounds?” Bannister asked.
“Not me, Sir. I’m acting only as a proxy. Paul, do you have any objections?”
Paul was stunned. He accepted the money gratefully and Gines said that he would have the painting picked up by the end of the day.
“Paul,” Gines said as he handed over the bank draft, “I’m told that were you to offer a series of paintings along the same lines, you might be reasonably confident of a significant return. My employer is a gambler. Likes long odds, and isn’t afraid of the future.”
After Gines left, the class burst into applause. Bannister shook his head and asked to speak to Paul in private. As Paul followed his teacher into his office, the one could hide his annoyance as little as the other could his elation.
“You’ve had quite a windfall,” Bannister said. “Evidently there is someone out there who’s willing to take a gamble on something that, were you to ask me, is radically out of step with every canon of taste we currently hold dear.”
Paul sat there silently, chuffed to have the money in his pocket. He looked at the tattered, dog-eared books on the shelf behind Bannister, waiting for him to warn him away from the prospect of a public exhibition, and steeling himself to resist the advice of his teacher.
“It is highly unusual for a student at your level to be selling paintings, Paul, and I’d warn you not to get carried away, especially given the, well, the unorthodox nature of the work. If this fellow, Gines – quite frankly I have no recollection of him from Antwerp or anywhere else — is going to bribe you into stylistic excess, well, I’d be thinking very carefully if I were you.”
“I will think carefully, Sir,” Paul said. He’d already made up his mind to sell what he could and send Bannister’s monotonous tonal realism the way of the dinosaurs.
That evening Paul began sketching nudes in his pad, refining and expanding upon the style of the painting Gines had bought. The pictures were crude, contorted, needlessly abstract, but their mockery of discipline, control and the sterile cult of formal accomplishment excited him. He imagined that he had been put in touch with the elemental forces pulsing through the history of art. They gripped him, rendered his hand unsteady, and ruptured all harmony with their violent convulsions. The coherence of the image was ripped open. It was always an act of sacrifice in which an ideal conception of the body – pristine, celestial, transcendent – was conquered by the power of the artist. The images were torn, bleeding, unclean t
hings and in them Paul possessed his sister more completely and more brutally than he ever would when she held him in the thrall of their all too chaste intimacy. He thought about the stillness of her room, the light in her blond hair, the sharp crystalline casing that closed around his pulsing heart as he touched her. What powers did he serve as he imagined the violation he could inflict with paint? His lust poured onto the page exalting all impure, adulterate things. His obsession plunged him into the formlessness of his own violent urges.
In the weeks that followed, Paul struggled to maintain his composure in class. Aware of the director’s disapproval, he still had trouble keeping his impulses in check. Since the appearance of Gines he had become the one the other students looked up to. Even the older students welcomed him to their table at Fasoli’s where he’d smoke and talk confidently about art and the elemental as if he were a fêted café philosopher. In the studio some of the students had begun to imitate him. Bannister looked on impotently as tonal realism degenerated into rhapsodies of abstract colour and anamorphic form. In art history classes Paul began to explore the precedents for anarchy prevailing over order, the Dionysian impulse over the Apollonian. He was mesmerised by Bosch and Breughel. In “The Triumph of Death” he saw the apocalyptic engine driving the creative spirit and his heart beat uncontrollably at the revelation.
All the time he was waiting for Gines to reappear. He even tried to will his presence. How else were his plans to come to fruition? Weeks and weeks passed, leaving him in a state of heated expectation. And just as Paul felt his energy ebbing away, as if his enthusiasm had run its course, there he was outside the studio, waiting as if not a day had passed since their first meeting.
Gines hugged himself inside his cloak like a vampire.
“Paul,” he gestured with a nod of his head and an impish grin, “a word if I may.”
“I should thank you,” Paul said. “I don’t think I managed it properly the other day.”
“Not at all. Not at all.”
“You said —”
But Gines cut him off. “I said, if you were to come up with another half-dozen canvases my employer would consider purchasing them. Without much effort you should clear at least a hundred pounds. There are some rooms at the top end of Little Collins Street under the Mercantile offices. You can hire them, I’m told, at a very reasonable rate for such a flash location, on the promise of a future return.”
“Your employer,” Paul asked, “won’t buy privately?”
“Dear, dear, where’s the fun in that? Why hide your light under a bushel? I think we’re after a bit of notoriety, don’t you? The art of the future must strike out like lightning – burning the timid like tinder.”
The man spoke with fervour. His eyes lit up with a demonic sparkle and it was all Paul could do to subdue the flames they lit in his own heart.
“Can I ask the name of the buyer?”
He didn’t expect an answer, and in any event the absence of one was not about to blanket his resolve.
“You can, but for the moment it will get you nowhere. Imagine a wealthy, middle-aged woman, beautiful in her own way, who has noticed what a promising chap you are, Paul. Or, if you like, an old rake collecting curiosities for his candle-lit den. Now I’m not giving anything away, but we should probably take our patrons where we can find them.”
Gines wrote down a Little Collins Street address on the back of a calling card, and shook Paul’s hand. “Congratulations, young man. You have been chosen.” And with that he turned towards the river, his cloak billowing out behind him.
A moment of doubt crossed Paul’s mind. Gines’s personal oddity made him wary. In his fustian cloak and monocle he could have wandered out of the pages of some Satanic fable in which the tempter preys upon the flaws of gullible youth with promises of adulation and erotic fulfilment. If Paul had harboured a superstitious presentiment of the magical powers of allegory, he might have turned his back on Gines. But such things were unthinkable in the twentieth century. Satan was merely a figure of speech. Paul told himself to seize the moment chance had given him, for chance alone was at stake.
Before his doubts could resurface, he promptly marched over to Little Collins Street in search of the address Gines had jotted down. The shopfront under the Mercantile offices consisted of a large, open room connected to another behind it by a narrow hallway. A round man in a black suit busied himself sweeping dust onto the street.
“Can I help you?” he said without raising his eyes from the steady motion of the broom.
“Thought I might be interested in taking these rooms,” Paul said boldly, determined not to take a backward step.
“Too right?” said the man. “Young fella like you.”
“Yes. Young fella like me. Thought I’d use them as a studio.”
“That right? You’re not the young fella I was told about, are you?”
“Depends.”
“Mr Gines’s young friend?”
“I suppose I am,” Paul said, wondering at the extent of Gines’s influence.
“Yes, I suppose you are. Come in then. John Perryman, pleased to meet you.” The man thrust out a sweaty hand and gave Paul’s a vigorous shake. He led Paul through to the second room, concealed from the street. It contained an old, threadbare couch, pushed into a corner, a few chairs and a small writing desk. Perryman opened a back door which led onto a filthy alley running onto a slightly wider lane that linked Little Collins with Collins Street proper.
“Private access, of course. The soul of discretion. This would do nicely as an atelier,” he added with a pretentious flourish of French vowels. “And the main room, fronting the street and exposed through a large plate-glass window, would make a very decent exhibiting space. I’m told that you will want to show some of your work there.”
Paul was overwhelmed by the possibilities. By the end of the week he had arranged to rent the two rooms, paying Perryman up-front for the first two months. As soon as he could he showed Ondine his new retreat and the two of them, like overexcited children, converted the back room into a lavish fantasy of bohemian living. They bought an Oriental carpet, a large cut of velvet to throw over the old couch, an antique Venetian lamp with a deep red shade, a second-hand graphophone, some cheap lithographs depicting scenes from classical mythology and a host of other useless miscellanea all of which conspired to turn the studio into a rather tawdry expression of the artist’s rich inner life.
Ondine threw herself onto the couch, naïvely charmed by the transformation. “So, you are going to be a famous painter, after all,” she said. “Of course, I never doubted you. But I may end up being envious. What am I going to do when you’ve outgrown me?”
The sight of his sister’s long, elongated form reclining on the velvet excited him. He sat beside her and held her hand.
“We are like two children in a fairytale, Paul,” she said. “Like Hansel and Gretel. You, because you are a man, will be able to remain a child as long as you wish. In a way this is the privilege of art. But I, because I am a woman, will have to stop this sooner or later.”
He looked at her, barely comprehending. He kissed her gently on the lips. She returned the kiss, but then smiled weakly at him instead of pursuing his ardour. There was no envy in her expression. Without being able to explain why, she felt pity for her brother, and feared for his happiness, wondering why he would stake so much of himself on such a grand, but transparent illusion.
The next morning, Paul arrived at his studio and found a haggard young woman ensconced on the couch, admiring the crimson velvet and the accompanying effects.
“Hello,” she said brazenly. “I hope you don’t mind. Mr Gines asked Mr Perryman to let me in. He said you’d be needing a model and that I shouldn’t have to wait on the street. Might embarrass you.”
Paul was startled and took a step back. The young woman’s appearance had something both miraculous and comical about it, as if she’d been conjured out of thin air. The room he’d decorated only the previo
us day reeled in front of him as the young woman stood up. She was bedraggled but becoming, with a vampish appeal that he attributed to her pointed, triangular face.
“Bit of a chill in here. Mind if we light up a fire?” she asked, suppressing a shiver.
The earthiness of her voice convinced him that she was real. It was the voice of the street, not of some enchanted forest.
“Not at all. There’s a gas heater.”
Paul crouched down at the small space heater built into the wall and momentarily filled the room with the deathly smell of methane, before managing to summon the flicker of gentle blue flames inside the ceramic frame.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Roxanne,” she replied. “Mr Gines said that you might make me famous, or my body at least.” She giggled. “I said I’d not come, but he promised me your intentions are respectable.”
“Respectable. Yes, of course,” Paul said distractedly. He still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of finding a stranger waiting for him in his own studio.
“What other surprises does Mr Gines have in store?”
“Oh, he’s full of surprises, that one.”
“Tell me what you know about him,” he asked, sitting down and lighting a cigarette.
“Mind if I smoke?” she asked.
He offered her his case and a silver lighter he’d bought the day before along with his other purchases.
“What would you be wanting to know?”
“How, for instance, he found you.”
“Well, if you must know, Mr Nosey, he found me at the Arcadia, where he’s been coming by from time to time.”
“What’s the Arcadia?” Paul asked.
“Well, it’s a place, ain’t it. A place where men come to make themselves at home.”
“I see.”
A brothel, Paul thought to himself. For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off Roxanne, and was fixated on the idea that this woman in front of him, close enough for him to touch, would exchange herself for money.