The thought of George is on everyone’s mind for the first half-hour, then as the meal gets under way it begins to fade. For most of Francis’s guests this evening, George has never possessed a specific existence. He had at most been a picturesque adjunct to someone well known, and there seems to be a tacit agreement around the table that the conversation should be kept as far away from any reference to him as possible. My experience of death is limited to losing two grandparents and a friend when very young at school. This is the closest I’ve been to it, and I’m horrified and deeply frightened by the blank it leaves behind. There was George a couple of days ago at the Grand Véfour, ill at ease but fully present, and now it seems as if he is swiftly becoming little more than a memory.
In the lulls between replying to carefully phrased questions and topping up everyone’s glass, Francis is clearly elsewhere. He is paler than ever, and I wonder if he has managed to get any rest at all over the last few days, particularly since George probably ingested all the Tuinal tablets he depends on to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep.
Staring in front of him, with the sleeves of his sweater pushed up to the elbows, Francis suddenly breaks through the last two hours’ politesse:
‘And when I saw George again this afternoon on that film they did for the exhibition, I thought how good-looking he was. He’d never seemed so present and so marvellous.’
Miss Beston is crying into her handkerchief.
‘There it is. He’s dead now. Nothing can be done.’
Francis looks down the table with a small tight smile, repeating:
‘Nothing can be done.’
We all shift in uneasy sympathy. No one speaks.
Francis leans forward in an effort to say something more, gazing fixedly into the middle of the table. Then he glances up and through his guests. No one dares look back at him.
The waitress starts collecting the empty plates.
A thin, elderly woman emerges from the kitchen and stands blinking in our direction, curious to see what the large party that has eaten and drunk so much is like. As she comes into Francis’s vision he appears to recognize her and stretches out both arms.
‘You just have to keep your hand in,’ she is saying as she comes closer. ‘That’s the real secret. And the right shallots, mind.’
‘Well, it was simply delicious,’ Francis says to her, as if in a dream. ‘I sometimes do it, it sounds mad, but I sometimes do it with margarine. It’s never as good as yours, though. Of course.’
‘It’s keeping your hand in that makes proper beurre blanc,’ Mère Michel repeats, standing by his side, looking at the quietened guests. ‘I make it every day.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Francis says, raising his arms higher in recognition.
‘What beautiful arms you have,’ one of the women from the Grand Palais says, her own braceleted brown arms propping up a face of smiling admiration.
‘Are they? Are they beautiful?’ Francis asks. He looks stern and holds them both in front of his face, considering them critically.
‘Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are simply beautiful. There’s nothing you can do about those things. That’s simply the way they are.’
The loss and the drink and the absurdity settle like a shroud over our table.
‘But so have you,’ Francis says, starting out of absorption elsewhere and taking hold of Mère Michel’s arm. ‘You have beautiful arms too, Madame,’ he says, pushing up her jumper sleeve to reveal a thin, old woman’s arm and holding it out for the table to admire.
Mère Michel stands there, smiling through her uncertainty.
Letting her arm go, Francis says to her directly, discreetly, as if only the two of them could hear:
‘It’s never worked, has it, life with someone else? Those things never work out. Do you live with a husband, Madame?’
‘He’s dead, Monsieur, he—’
‘I know he’s dead. It never worked, I know that. It was impossible from the start.’
‘But Albert and I were very hap—’
‘Of course. It always goes wrong in the end. There it is.’
Francis fills a glass and puts it in her hand. Then he drains his own, looking at her over the rim, wet lips pursed, pale eyes searching.
‘I know, of course,’ he says. ‘Those things have always been impossible.’
9
Consumed by Guilt
There’s been no news from Francis for several weeks. I keep thinking of calling him but haven’t called. It’s not that I worry it would disturb him: if he’s working, he simply takes the telephone off the hook. But he’s not the kind of person you ring simply to ask how they are, how they’re feeling. If you call, he expects you to have a reason. Still, I am very anxious to know how he’s managing to deal with this horrible, painful situation, and it seems increasingly callous not to be in touch.
Meanwhile my work has been going well enough. I’ve finished all my exhibition reviews, as well as a couple of ‘in-depth’ and ‘think’ pieces, so a trip to London would, among other things, allow me to see a few editors and keep the commissions coming in. As soon as my dates are fixed, I call Francis. I don’t get through at first, but when he does answer he sounds rather distant. Nevertheless he suggests we meet for lunch at Wheeler’s the day after I arrive.
I make a point of getting to Old Compton Street early because I want to wander through Soho and look at a few old haunts. Everything looks much the same. The fruit and veg is still changing hands rapidly in Berwick Street and the girls in the doorways haven’t got any more alluring. I find this reassuring but when I reach the murky green windows of Wheeler’s I take a deep breath. I have no idea what sort of state Francis will be in.
As I go in, I’m cheered because the owner, Bernard Walsh, gives me a friendly wave from behind the oyster counter and even one of the waiters seems to recognize me. But I’m brought up short when I see Francis, who’s already in the snug bar. It’s not just that he’s pale, he’s become almost translucent, with a strange bluish hue as if he were deathly cold. I down my first glass of Chablis quickly.
‘How have you been, Michael?’ Francis asks.
‘I’ve been alright, Francis,’ I say. ‘I’ve been writing reviews and things, and trying to do a little writing of my own. I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere.’
‘Those things can be very difficult,’ Francis says in a detached voice. ‘I didn’t begin to paint seriously until I was well into my thirties. I don’t know why, I often regret it, but I think it was just one of those things you can’t alter. I think my development was retarded – I was simply a late beginner.’
‘And how have you been, Francis?’ I say, swallowing hard. ‘I mean, since Paris.’
‘An hour doesn’t go by when I don’t think about him,’ Francis says, very simply. ‘I feel profoundly guilty about his death.’
‘But there’s nothing you could have done, Francis.’
‘If I hadn’t gone out that morning, if I’d simply stayed in and made sure he was alright, George might have been alive now. It’s a fact. He’d tried it before, you know. Several times. But I’d always been able to get him to a hospital in time.’
I thought back to what Sonia had said when she announced George’s death in the café: ‘I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t that.’ Of course it was: that much was obvious from the start.
With his mouth pursed, Francis starts brushing non-existent crumbs off the tablecloth. Things that won’t go away.
‘He always did it under drink. I came back to the studio once and he was there with these friends of his, they were all dead drunk and just lying round the place. And George was stretched out on the floor with his sleeping pills strewn right round him. So I tried to ask these friends what he’d been doing, whether he’d been taking them or what – but they were just too drunk to know. It turned out he’d been taking them like sweets, and they had to pump them out of him. He was very ill after that – it did some permanent damage to his st
omach.
‘George changed completely with drink. Because when he was sober, you know, he was so careful of himself. He always looked to right and left before crossing the street and those sorts of things.’
‘I know. I remember.’
‘Well, you remember how obsessive he was about being clean? He simply never stopped washing himself. But he’s dead now. If I’d known what I know now I’d have left him exactly as he was when I first met him. However mean it might have looked. Because in the end, by giving him enough money to be able to do nothing, I took his incentive away. His stealing did give him a raison d’être, you see. Even though he wasn’t very successful at it and was always in and out of prison. But it gave him something to think about. When he was inside, he’d spend all his time planning what he would do when he came out. And so on. I thought I was helping him when I took him out of that life. I knew the next time he was caught he’d get a heavy sentence. And I thought, well, life’s too short to spend half of it in prison. But I was wrong of course. I should have left him exactly as he was. He’d have been in and out of prison, but at least he’d have been alive.’
‘You couldn’t have known how things were going to turn out.’
‘I should have stayed in that morning and not bothered about the exhibition. You remember he was off the drink that time we met at the Grand Véfour? Well, he went back to it of course, and then he became totally impossible again. The rest of the time, when he was sober, he could be terribly engaging and gentle. He used to love being with children and animals, you know. I think he was a nicer person than me. He was more, what’s the word, compassionate. He was certainly much too nice to be a crook. That was the trouble. He only went in for stealing because he’d been born into it, into that whole East End atmosphere where it’s what’s expected of you. Everybody he knew went in for it. I mean, I remember George telling me how sometimes, when he was a boy, he used to wake in the night and find his mother going through his pockets looking for money.
‘He could have got a job easily if he’d had any discipline, because he was very good with his hands. I got him something with my framer, where he was going to learn gilding, which pays very good money. But he didn’t make anything of it. Well, I can understand that it’s much more exciting to steal than to go out to a job every day. But in the end he did nothing but go and get completely drunk . . . It’s ridiculous to think you can help people. You can’t.’
‘You can’t blame yourself for having tried to make his life better, Francis. It’s a marvellous way you have – you’ve improved life for a lot of your friends. You’ve made mine more interesting, for one.’
‘It’s terribly nice of you to say that, Michael, but I’m afraid it doesn’t change the fact my life’s been a disaster. Right the way through. So many of the people I’ve known have been drunks or suicides – all the ones I’ve been really fond of have died in one way or another. I just seem to attract those kinds of people – d’you think there’s a reason for it?’
‘Well, I suppose George was drawn by your expansiveness, the freedom and sense of living life to the full that you communicate. That must attract a lot of people. Didn’t you say he just came up to you in a bar and offered to buy you a drink because you looked as if you were having a good time? Well. Someone with your kind of self-confidence is bound to attract all kinds of neurotics because they think it might give them something to hold on to. And in any case I don’t imagine you can ever stop people who really want to commit suicide. They’ll always find a way.’
‘Perhaps,’ Francis says. The talk and the wine seem to have thawed a little of the cold out of him. ‘I’m afraid I’ve always had those kinds of people in my life. And it’s only when they’re dead that you realize just how fond of them you were.’
We go on through the round of afternoon bars, ending up at Muriel’s. Everyone appears to know what has happened, and people go out of their way to be kind to him. I have already had more than I want to drink and would prefer to spend a relatively sober evening with my friend David, who once again has offered me an unlimited stay in his comfortable flat. But I feel I have to go to the end of the course with Francis. So we have dinner at Mario and Franco’s, where I eat a pyramid of pasta to mop up all the booze I’ve had, and then, as in some Dantesque punishment, we go back to the same bars but in a differing order and Francis repeats and repeats what he’s said before, shifting the emphasis and from time to time adding the odd detail to what he’s already told me, so that everything looks and sounds like everything else and we appear to be in a kind of ever-decreasing vortex except that really both of us by now are legless with drink and I manage to get Francis back to Reece Mews, wondering how he’ll ever get up that steep ship’s ladder to his studio. As I creep back into David’s flat, I’m glad to see he’s gone to bed, probably hours ago, but when I lie down the drink and the conversation continue to circle round my head with Francis’s voice crackling like an old record that will never stop:
‘The door was locked well I knew it was locked I hadn’t seen him since the morning before he’d gone right back on the drink I knew that he’d gone out on one of those long bouts round the bars it sounds absurd I know for an old drunk like me to say but when he was drinking like that he became completely impossible but I should have got somebody from the hotel right away to come and break the door down I should have just stayed in with him rather than going to see about the exhibition but I didn’t there it is he’s dead now I should have known he’d tried things like that before I’d always got him to hospital in time and later when there was still no answer they broke the door down and there was all this mess and things strewn about and you could see he’d tried to vomit the stuff up again but he hadn’t been able to and there he was dead.’
Mercifully, as dawn comes up on Lennox Gardens and a pale light begins to play on the ceiling, I drift off at last into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Francis has asked me to the studio to look at a picture he has just finished of George. I’ve been wandering around the area this afternoon to see what’s changed over the past couple of years. It’s like gazing into the face of someone you know intimately but haven’t been with for a while, and although everything is basically the same you realize that the little veins on the cheek are more pronounced, then you notice the furrow you hadn’t seen before on either side of the mouth. The Danish restaurant has become a bodega and you hear more foreign languages on the streets than you used to. But the same man is hawking newspapers outside South Kensington tube, and there’s still the strange collection of down-and-outs lying on the pavement just round the corner; I remember that when I walked past them one evening with Francis, they all cheered and waved their bottles admiringly at him as if saluting a hero, a moment which amused and moved me as having something almost Shakespearean about it. Dino’s is also still there, still dishing out the lasagne, and people continue to have that abstractly benign air in the street peculiar to the English, and certainly not something I’ve come across in Paris.
Reece Mews looks the same, too, if rather smaller and greyer, and so does the battered blue door of number 7, which Francis has left ajar for me. I pull myself up on the greasy rope and find nothing much has changed here either. There are a couple of suits back from the cleaners hanging in cellophane on the kitchen door, pinned reproductions of Francis’s own paintings over the sink and pieces of burnt toast on the draining board. All the lights are on, even though it’s not dark yet outside. I have the fleeting impression that something is broken that was not broken before. Francis is waiting for me in the living room. We are both formally dressed in dark suits because we are having dinner at Wiltons with Lucian Freud and the Duke of Devonshire. The Moroccan cover on the bed looks less sumptuous than I remember it, but the great crack spreading out its tentacles over the mirror is exactly the same, although it now seems more threatening. It catches us both as we talk, moving back and forth, and with the malevolently yellow electric lights highlighting our fragmented ref
lections, we look as though we are miming a Bacon picture, Two Figures in a Broken Mirror. Watching him, I say, quite without thinking about it:
‘Sometimes I wonder how you’ll be in ten years’ time.’
We’re watching each other in the mirror now, as if we have been transposed there and are watching ourselves like actors in a play.
Suddenly, his mouth arched in contempt, Francis pulls his index finger across his throat like a thick, fleshy knife, as if to say: ‘I’ll kill myself before then.’
Then the moment is past and forgotten.
Francis is coldly courteous, occasionally flashing a blank smile for no reason and glancing frequently at his watch even though we have plenty of time. He has been sifting through the jumble of books and papers on his table for his door keys.
‘It’s mad, I know I left them here somewhere,’ he says. ‘They just get swallowed up in all this squalor I live in.’
He pads off back to the kitchen. Beside the mirror there is an alcove with framed photographs of Peter Lacy, sometimes alone, sometimes with Francis. There is also a picture of Francis looking very young, and the one of George looking anxious. It’s like a shrine, and I wonder what new images of George will come to join them.
Something crashes to the floor in the kitchen and Francis comes back gripping his raincoat.
‘They were in my pocket the whole time,’ he says. ‘Naturally.’
‘You look so young in that photo, Francis,’ I say.
‘Do I look young?’ he says. ‘Well, there it is, but I was over forty at the time.’
‘You can see from the eyes that you’re not really that young, but otherwise you look barely thirty.’
‘Well, that’s a family thing. My mother remained very young looking.’
‘It’s great to have genes like that,’ I say, attempting to introduce a little levity into the conversation.
Francis Bacon in Your Blood Page 21