The Sea Lady
Page 24
There had been a time when he had thought that Tommy might shop them. Tommy could have sold them to the Evening Standard for a few quid and a laugh, but he didn't. Maybe he didn't need the money. Maybe Ailsa had blackmailed him into silence: she must have known more about Tommy than Tommy could have wanted anybody to know. One way or another, Tommy had kept his mouth shut, and by now the secret was probably past its sell-by date. Ailsa was still newsworthy, but maybe not for so much longer.
The other witness to the marriage, the man called Blake, was last heard of in a psychiatric hospital in Surrey, driven mad, in Humphrey's view, by the behaviour of his Ichneumonidae. These were the creatures whose unnatural and destructive instincts had confirmed Darwin's suspicions that there was no God, and that evolution condoned all cruelties, all crimes. Blake would never have betrayed a secret, and if he were to speak now, who would believe him?
Darwin had not liked the way cats play with mice. God, in Darwin's view, would not have endorsed such behaviour.
Humphrey sighed at these memories, but then his spirits rose a little. Blake might have gone off the rails, but Ailsa was still in fighting form. And her form has not been entirely vulgar. At times, she has been splendid. Indeed, at times, she has been little short of sublime.
The Hall of the Muses
It is a classically formidable venue. Standing in the wings, she sees the platform and the podium and the screen and the carousel of slides. She can hear the undifferentiated murmuring of the audience, which is already seated in the dim, expectant hall. The lofty Palladian dome of the historic ceiling soars, and the high walls are rich with the dull gleam of the heavy gold-framed oil paintings of antique muses and eighteenth-century worthies. This audience is hard to please. It is scholarly and patrician and discriminating. It is hardened against charm and brilliance alike. It does not suffer fools gladly. The anticipatory murmur may be hostile, for the audience enjoys the spectacle of the failure of others. It has patronized events in this hall for two centuries, and it has disdained some of those who have addressed it. It does not throw eggs, or knit stockings, for it is too well-mannered for such plebeian displays of hostility or indifference. But it knows how to spurn.
Some of its members object to the very word 'venue'. But it is a useful word, and so the Committee has at last begun to employ it. The Committee moves, slowly, with the times.
The innovative young Director, standing by her side, is nervous, though he cannot yet know precisely what he has to be nervous about. Ailsa Kelman is a wild card, but she is also a fine catch, and she brings in the crowds. Not that they need 'crowds' here, but they do need to broaden their appeal, or so the Scottish Arts Council has told them. The traditional audience this evening has been augmented by the presence of some younger people, which must be thought to be a good thing. There are even said to be some students out there tonight. Students do not often bother to come to the McIveagh Memorial Lecture, although it is free for all.
The Director is nervous about Ailsa Kelman's performance, and he is also nervous about the discreet presence of television cameras. It is only the second time that they have been admitted into this venerable room, and the insurance problems have been complex. Television is a fire risk and a theft risk. Nothing will go out 'live' to the nation, of course not, but there will eventually be an edited version for public distribution showing highlights from the exhibition and clips from the lecture and close-ups of some of the more distinguished patrons. (It is interesting that the patrons, even the titled ones, seem to like to see their faces on television. They are as childish about this as those teenagers whose ambition is to appear in the audience of Top of the Pops, although naturally they do not admit it. They pretend to be coy, but they manage to find themselves standing at a helpful angle in front of the camera just the same.)
Ailsa has already been filmed and interviewed on a prerecorded tour of the exhibition, which is based on the theme of Byron and the liberation of Greece. This is not a very Scottish theme, but Byron was a Scot, and the ingenious Curator has managed to assemble an impressive and curious array of what may later be called Scottish Orientalism, although the word 'Orientalism' in its modern pejorative sense has not yet come into common usage – Edward Said's book on this subject had not yet been published. But the ideas of Said are blowing in the wind, and have reached Curator James McClintock and the Academy, and are now embodied in the Waverley Gallery in his eclectic display of landscapes and maidens, boats and marines, portraits and tableaux.
Ailsa Kelman had been full of admiration for the exhibition, for these ideas had also reached her and inspired her, and she had been working on them in her own free-style restless random way. Ailsa Kelman lacks method, but what she lacks in method she makes up for in energy and originality and output and panache. She has pursued Delacroix from Chios to the Louvre, and she has written and lectured on Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb and the significance of fancy dress in the Regency period. She has written a pioneering study of one of Delacroix's models, a study so avant-garde that nobody, not even she, its author, realized what it signified. She has made a television series about European women who fell in love with and in the desert, a series with the (borrowed) title of The Wilder Shores of Love. She has skipped from the desert to the Pacific to study the sexual fantasies inspired by blue lagoons and coral atolls, for her imagination is fertile and her curiosity, though often short-lived, is insatiable. And now she is back where she started, with Byron, in the Isles of Greece. She is, at this point in her career, an admirer, though not an uncritical admirer, of Lord Byron.
Byron and Burns, those faithless lovers and shameless womanizers, have long been recognized as problematic figures by female critics. Nearly two centuries ago, Jane Austen was sharp about both of them. Ailsa Kelman takes her own line on Byron. She has not as yet addressed herself to Burns, although she knows many of his poems by heart from her schooldays and the indoctrination of Bonnie Mrs Lesley of Bonsett.
The Devil has the best tunes, says Ailsa, and the libertines write the best love songs.
The Director of the Caledonian Academy is pale of skin and has dark flowing 1970s hair. His hair is longer than Ailsa Kelman's and Lord Byron's.
Ailsa is the first woman ever to deliver the Mclveagh Memorial Lecture, and both she and the Director are highly conscious of this novel aspect of the evening's proceedings. She has somehow achieved a high level of academic respectability, in a manner that evades definition and arouses considerable distrust, envy and resentment.
One would not readily divine her academic status from her dress.
One may distrust Ailsa Kelman's academic qualifications, but one can trust her to dress with deliberation. For this occasion, she has chosen to become a Muse. She has selected a flowing full-length low-bosomed pale cream dress with a silver thread woven into its fabric: her arms are encircled by bangles of silver wire, and her dark red hair is caught back in a white silk snood embellished with a few fragile little silver coins which will quiver fetchingly as she speaks. The softly draped back of the dress is cut even lower than the frontage: when she turns her back upon the audience to point at her slides, as she does frequently, she is nude to the waist, and the cleavage of her buttocks is suggestively indicated. Her shoulder blades are in full view, and so is the curve of her spine. Her eyes are heavily accented with black liner, and her lashes are theatrically enhanced. The effect of the whole is hybrid: there is a touch of the classical, a touch of the Oriental, and more than a touch of the hippie in her presentation. As she steps forward on to the rostrum, hooded old eyes open wider to appraise her effrontery. The age of opera glasses and lorgnettes is over, but spectacles are taken out of cases and polished on spotted cotton handkerchiefs and venerable scraps of chamois leather to aid a better viewing of her fine bosom and her round arms.
The miniskirt is passé, which is a relief to Ailsa, who has decided that her legs are too muscular to display to advantage.
Posture, Ailsa, posture, says Ailsa to h
erself, as she straightens her spine to address her task.
The lecture is mesmeric, the slides sensational. At first Dr Kelman speaks knowledgeably and solemnly and respectfully of landscapes and seascapes, of Byron and Goethe, of Sir Walter Scott and Saladin, of the Celtic and the Germanic yearning for the soft south. She contrasts images of bleakness and opulence, of shade and sun. She allows the audience to settle into her voice and her rhythm. (She has entirely lost the strangely depressed and elongated diphthongs of the Durham coalfields, and the American overlay with which she had once tried to disguise them: her voice in this middle period of her career is confidently cultured, melodious, Third Programme.) The audience, although puzzled by the contrast between speech and speaker, relaxes and decides to enjoy itself: this is a good deal less boring than that old chap from the Fitzwilliam who harangued them for fifty minutes about Poussin last year.
The audience relaxes, and Ailsa, sensing its lowered guard, goes in for the kill. She summons up to the screen a shocking image of rape and slaughter, and embarks on her proto-feminist analysis of the massively cruel canvas of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. Detail follows detail, of breast and thigh, of buttock and throat, of knife and nostril. This is not a picture for easy communal viewing, and Ailsa's commentary and her choice of slides spare them nothing. The dying bodies writhe, the old gentlemen in the audience cough and rustle, some of the old ladies shut their eyes and try to shut their ears. It appears that Dr Kelman is mounting a pedantic defence of Byron's verse tragedy, which is said to have inspired the pornographic and sadistic vision of Eugène Delacroix. She is trying to tell them that in Byron's poem, only two people, a mere two people, die. Only Sardanapalus and his beloved Ionian slave Myrrha die, as it were on stage, and they die in fiery ecstasy by their own hands after the notional curtain falls. This vast oil painting, this tasteless and offensive spectacle of despotic torture and mass murder and female sacrifice, watched by a gloating Assyrian monarch, cannot be laid to the charge of their countryman Byron. No, the Frenchman Delacroix is the offender. Byron, the noble Scot, is innocent. And so, incidentally, for what it's worth, is Syria.
She reads to them from Byron's poem, she reads to them from unnecessarily graphic contemporary accounts of the massacres at Chios, she reads to them from the journals of Delacroix. She mentions rapes and genitals and eviscerations and disembowellings. It is very strong stuff, X-Certificate stuff. The Director is not sure whether it is a triumph or a disaster or both, but he is gripped by it. It is like nothing he has ever heard before. Here is a woman who lacks all sense of decorum, talking passionately about the lack of decorum of two great men.
He is fairly sure that nobody in the Hall of the Muses will ever have read Byron's Sardanapalus, though many of them will know the painting. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, maybe they may know that one, because it is in every anthology, but they will not know Sardanapalus, or even the Giaour. He cannot be sure if her account of Byron's poem is fair, for he has not read it himself. She compels them to listen to the obscure, the unfashionable, the unknown. It is brave. She has strayed far from her brief, and she has upstaged the Curator, but who cares? The Director does not care if his job is on the line, so full of admiration does he find himself. He is enslaved. He would drink champagne out of her slipper, as the oil-rig workers drink these days from the shoes of the whores in the pubs of Aberdeen.
Her conclusion is theatrical and superb. Having berated poor Delacroix at length and with a display of overpowering erudition for sadism, eroticism and pornography, for abuse of models and of women and of Turks and of Greeks and of Jews and of gin, she draws to a climax by bringing up a slide of a drawing of a naked woman, seen from behind. The model is naked except for a little slipper that falls seductively from her heel. This is, as Ailsa tells them, a pastel sketch for the larger canvas, red chalk on paper. It is delicate, beautiful, fragile. She informs them that it has recently come up for sale, in a small gallery in Paris. She informs them of the high price that had been asked and indeed received. She lets the image linger on the screen.
'We must ask ourselves,' she says, 'what we feel when we look at this image. We must ask ourselves about art, anger, beauty and cruelty. Ask ourselves about the nature of Eros, and why we are attracted to these images. And we should consider the attractive title that the dealers saw fit to bestow upon this image. They sold it as "Female nude, killed from behind".'
She delivers these last five words with conviction and contempt and a tempting, collusive allure.
'Killed from behind,' she repeats. 'A high art image, by one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century, of a naked woman, killed from behind, sketched here for our arousal and for our delight.'
And then, in a rapid swirl from her carousel, she silently projects upon the screen a shotgun, stroboscopic, barely visible sequence of slides, culled it would seem from mid-twentieth-century medium-core SM pornographic magazines, of breasts and backs and female orifices, of knives and whips and thongs, of penetrations and bodily invasions, inter-cut with flashes of Andromeda and Angelica in bondage culled from more orthodox sources. The involuntary response of the gathering is palpable, audible, as these violently erotic images flash almost imperceptibly by: it expresses itself in heavings and low rustlings and swellings and shiftings and indignant mutterings, but before any protest has time to formulate itself, she returns to linger on a final, frozen, haunting, arresting detail from The Massacre at Chios.
The beautiful dead child lies on the breast of the beautiful dead woman.
'So how can it be,' asks Ailsa rhetorically, 'that I am so much in love with the genius of Delacroix? With the very great genius of Delacroix?'
And Dr Kelman closes her notes, and bows, and turns her aggressively, seductively naked back and curved buttocks upon her audience, and then walks rapidly off into the wings.
The applause begins tentatively, but grows and grows, to an immense and flattering crescendo. They want her back on stage, they want to take another look at her, to see if they can believe their eyes. She returns to the platform, the lights go up, and she takes her bow.
The Director steps forward and thanks her for an historic evening, a landmark lecture, an unforgettable event. She bows, and smiles. She is a star. The applause follows her backstage.
As the Director told her much later that night, as he congratulated her more intimately in her hotel room over a rapidly emptying bottle of Macallan's malt, she had wowed them all, even the Chair of the Board.
'For e'en the ranks of Tuscany', he said, as he slid his hand beneath her firm but compliant breast, 'could scarce forbear to cheer.'
Humphrey Clark had watched on his television set, alone, the heavily edited but nevertheless sensational version of that evening's spectacle in the Caledonian Hall of the Muses. He had seized the thread of her lecture, and he had traced it back to the old museum on the island of Chios. (There is a new museum there now, called the Homerion, but he has not seen it.) He had remembered the Hotel Actaeon, and the assault of the mosquitoes, and her peculiarly insistent probing of his heel with a needle, and the proposal by the rubbish tip. He had noted that she was wearing the silver bangles that he had bought in Athens to mark their betrothal. So she had them still, she wore them still, although she was, by this stage, twice married, twice divorced. Would she know that he would watch her? Had she thought of him as she clipped the bracelets around her arms? Did she even remember who gave them to her? Did she think of him, ever, ever, ever? Did she think of the many times that he had made love to her, and of the fantasies they had enacted, the games they had played? He was the only man alive who knew that section of her history, and he had kept his knowledge to himself. A part of her lived on in him, in his body, in his consciousness, and nowhere else.
Yes, when she was young she had been, at times, sublime.
When we two parted
In silence and tears
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years...
They know not I knew thee
Who knew thee too well
Long, long shall I rue thee...
Humphrey had followed Ailsa's career over the years from a distance, secretly. Nobody spoke of her to him, not even her brother Tommy Kelman. Once or twice, over the years, late at night or in forlorn anonymous hotels, Humphrey had thought of ringing her. He had this notion that she would answer him, and that they would be able to speak to each other, and that no harm would be done, and that the harm that had been done would be undone. But he had no number and no voice and his words stalled before they began to shape. The current was dammed.
His second wife Dorothy knew the bald facts and dates of his brief first marriage (shamingly, he had been obliged to provide his divorce papers and his decree absolute in order to marry again) but she had been more than happy to enter the Ailsa-denying conspiracy of silence. Stout, dull, clever, plodding lab assistant Dorothy had been happy enough to snap up Humphrey Clark, and to obliterate the catastrophe of Ailsa. She had jumped at his proposal. Now, looking back, he realized that she had angled for it. Her career prospects were at that time poor, and his were good. He was a good match, a good catch. At that time, he had thought he was being adult in marrying the subordinate Dorothy. Mature, adult, responsible. Not immature, impulsive, romantic. He would look no more for Eros and Perfect Happiness. He would settle for a supportive, secondary, faithful, caring, capable wife.