Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Are you Mr Bacon then?’ the driver says after a while.

  ‘Mr Bacon, Mrs Bacon or Miss Bacon,’ says Francis. ‘However you like it, dear.’

  We go up to the studio while the Daimler purrs on the cobblestones outside.

  ‘I know I’ve got some money here somewhere,’ Francis says, picking up odd tins of dried paint out of the mess on the floor and shaking them.

  I join in, beginning to giggle at the scene.

  ‘Ah, there we are,’ Francis says triumphantly, shaking a tin over his head as scores of notes come floating down.

  We collect them all up, shove them into Francis’s pockets and go back to Crockford’s.

  Francis wanders back to the tables and loses even more quickly than before. Once again, this does not appear to affect him. On the contrary, he appears exultant, as if losing were far more desirable and welcome than winning. Once again, the Daimler awaits us and drops me in Knightsbridge before taking Francis home. Francis seems particularly keen that we should meet again tomorrow, and although I’m slightly anxious that he might turn if he sees too much of me, I agree. I’m still quite high on the wine and my win.

  Next evening is almost like a replica. We have a delicious dinner, but at the Connaught this time.

  ‘I’ve got the money you gave me,’ says Francis when we sit down, and he passes an even thicker wad of cash to me under the table.

  ‘But Francis, it was your money,’ I protest weakly.

  ‘No,’ he says, very firmly, in a voice I have learnt not to counter. ‘It’s the money you won and lent to me.’

  After dinner we go back to Crockford’s and start gambling. I am still as inexpert but I play with a bit more purpose, while still feeling it’s play money, like Monopoly notes, I’m using. I have several wins, no doubt modest in comparison to the sums in play all around, but when I tot the total up, I have made more than I earn in a year. I scrape my chips together and have them turned back into hard cash.

  Francis arrives beaming. I suspect he’s lost again, but he’s clearly undaunted.

  ‘I’m absolutely ravenous,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we go to Annabel’s and have some bacon and eggs?’

  The chauffeur whisks us down the street into Berkeley Square.

  ‘It’s there,’ says Francis, chuckling. ‘There where all those things with cockades in their hats are standing.’

  The car stops at Annabel’s and the footmen hold the door while we clamber out.

  There’s more champagne, and when the bacon and eggs appear Francis orders a very fine Château Latour. I find I’m hungry too, although I think my appetite is for the sheer luxury and fun of the evening rather than food.

  Then we go back to champagne and sit near the dance floor which is raked by coloured strobe lighting. The music is good and I still recognize all the hits they’re playing. There are a few dancers on the floor. On the sofa next to us there are four girls laughing among themselves.

  ‘Why don’t you dance, Michael?’ Francis asks.

  ‘I don’t know who I’d dance with,’ I say, laughing. The idea seems preposterous.

  ‘You could ask the girls over there,’ Francis suggests unhesitatingly.

  ‘I can’t just ask like that,’ I say. I’m embarrassed now.

  ‘My friend says he can’t just ask you to dance,’ Francis says, leaning forward in the gloom to the row of girls. I’ve noticed that a couple of them are quite pretty. ‘But what d’you think? I’ve told him that these places are made for dancing. Don’t you agree?’

  The girls seem all up for it, so I get to my feet a bit awkwardly and accompany one of them on to the floor. She turns out to be one of the more attractive ones, but it hardly matters because all her friends have joined us on the floor as if they’d been waiting all evening for this and everybody lets themselves go to the music and when certain old favourites like ‘Satisfaction’ come up I feel some of my old prowess coming back and start strutting stuff I haven’t done for years and we’re all caught in the light and the movement and the music and the laughter, and by the time the club closes I’m still laughing and I realize in the cab going home I’ve got a small fortune bulging out of my jacket and that in turn makes me laugh even more, alarming the cab driver who thinks he’s got a right one in the back and looks distinctly relieved as he drops me off at David’s front door.

  Drunk and exhilarated, I make myself comfortable on the sofa and drift off into a deep sleep for the first time in months, and when I wake up I’m still laughing, laughing at the marvellous frivolity of it all, and although I can’t forget I’m still beaten black and blue on the inside, I know now something fundamental has changed. I know now that, whatever darkness I still have before me, I’m going to get my life back.

  13

  Whose Turn is it Now?

  ‘You remember Michael?’ Francis asks.

  ‘Course I do dear,’ Muriel says in a warm boozy wheeze.

  ‘He used to be much better looking before he grew that beard,’ Francis informs the handful of drinkers gathered round. I recognize Frank Norman, with the big scar down his cheek, and Robert Carrier, the TV chef they call the ‘Carrier bag’, as well as a couple of others I haven’t seen in years.

  ‘But there it is,’ Francis goes on, waving his champagne glass. ‘I suppose he thinks he looks better with it. He thinks he does. I myself like faces where you can see all the bone structure. Without any of those disguises.’

  ‘You might say that shaving itself is a disguise,’ I say, grinning uncomfortably.

  ‘Touché, dear,’ Carrier chimes in genially, touching Francis on the sleeve.

  Two more bottles of champagne are ordered from Ian behind the bar and all the Colony’s other members are drawn in. Francis launches into a more metaphysical theme. It’s just like old times, almost like going back to school, with all the old boys showing off, cracking jokes and talking dirty. I haven’t been back to London in months, but after a few minutes in Muriel’s dingy green den, with the afternoon sun highlighting the smoky fug inside, I feel I’m back home.

  ‘He’s really like Jesus. A superstar,’ says a baby-faced giant in blue jeans standing next to me, forcing the barely formed words round a cigar and pointing at Francis.

  He moves up the bar, plucks the cigar from its moist mount and repeats, giant-gentle:

  ‘You’re like Jesus’s become, man. A superstar.’

  Francis whips round, deliberately, knowingly, but his face is drawn up in pained surprise.

  ‘A what? A superstar?’ he asks mockingly, champagne glass aloft. ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re saying. I may be a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m a superstar. I can’t even think what you mean. What is a superstar?’

  The colossus grins, happy to take Francis closer to the heart of his meaning:

  ‘Well, you know. A kindavver cult figure. Come on now, man, you know you’re a kindavver cult figure yourself.’

  ‘I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Cult figure? Superstar? Perhaps you could say it all again, more clearly this time. After all, what can be clearly thought can be clearly said.’

  ‘Well like you know . . .’

  ‘Of course Voltaire also said, “What’s too silly to say can be sung,”’ Francis adds with a winning smile.

  From her corner stool, Muriel leans over and taps Francis sharply on the arm.

  ‘You’re not a superstar,’ she says rapidly, ‘you’re just a cunt, dear.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I am,’ Francis concedes, almost gratefully. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Who’s a cunt now?’ queries an adjacent drinker, swinging his grey face up from a long brood and pushing back a lank of lifeless hair.

  ‘The big one’s been calling him a superstar, dear,’ Muriel explains kindly, ‘so I said he’s not a superstar he’s just a cunt. You didn’t think I was talking about you you silly old ballock did you, dear?’

  ‘I don’t care who calls who what,’ the grey-faced man announces
with abrupt fervour. ‘We’d all be better off dead. The whole lot of us.’

  All attention turns on him.

  ‘I mean I can’t see why people cling to life. Why bother to come through one of those ghastly operations, I mean. To live a sort of half-life afterwards. What’s the point, you know, with everything difficult as it is anyway. Might as well die straight off and have done with it.’

  Francis moves a little nearer, his head cocked to one side in curiosity.

  ‘Well, that only depends on how much you really want to go on living,’ he says evenly.

  The grey-faced man’s yellowish eyes flicker in alarm at finding himself the centre of interest.

  ‘Now, myself, I do want to go on living,’ Francis goes on, watching the man’s face closely, watching his words at work. ‘I want to go on living even if I have to have one of those ghastly operations. Because there is nothing else, do you see? There is only life. Death only exists in the minds of the living. It’s nothing and it goes on being nothing for a very long time. So you can only go on living. Because that’s all there is. All one asks for, in the end, is a mind that works and a body that can somehow get itself from place to place. Because, in the end, life is about nothing more than that. We come from nothing and go into nothing, I’m afraid. So we must try to make what we can of the brief interval between. Now, tell me, what are you drinking?’

  ‘Mmm. Oh, whisky. Thanks. No, I mean death does sometimes present itself to one as a, well, as something of an attractive alternative. I mean at times, really, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t. No. Because death just isn’t anything. It’s absolute nothingness. Do you follow me? Now you can of course simply do yourself in. I always keep enough pills, because I hope that if ever I have a stroke, I’ll just manage to reach out for them in time. But I also hope to go on living for ever. It would be dreadful for everyone else, I’m sure, but what else is there to do?’

  ‘Well, I mean yes, I suppose. If you think of it like that.’

  ‘How else can you think about it? Unless you want to become compost. Unless you want to become compost for someone’s roses. Now do you want to become compost for someone’s roses?’

  ‘Ah. Haha. No, well, put that way of course I don’t, no. Still. No, put like that who would?’

  ‘There you are. Those are what are called the facts.’

  ‘All the fucks did you say, dear?’ rejoins Muriel, seated in noble repose against the wall, the bar light playing on her pearls. ‘When did you last have all the fucks then, daughter?’

  ‘Now that’s another story. About two weeks ago. Someone new I met and melted with. At least you pretend to melt with them, but you only pretend of course. And then it’s what’s called just another experience brushing off on you.’

  ‘Just think what must have brushed off over the years on her,’ says Ian with sudden venom from behind the bar. He makes an embittered moue and fussily tops up some more glasses with champagne.

  ‘Well, of course everything and everybody has brushed off on me over the years,’ Francis says, carefully sweeping his finger along the bar and inspecting it. ‘But it’s been the best of everybody. So I really don’t see why’, he goes on, turning the collar of his leather jacket up in mock protection, ‘you have to pick on a poor little thing like me. Now let’s have some more champagne. Yes, let’s have some more. Even if we do all drop down dead. Here’s to you, Muriel, I was just thinking how marvellous you look this evening. You have a beauty that goes right back to Egyptian or Babylonian times.’

  ‘He’s a real top-grade superstar. Like they’ve brought back Jesus,’ the giant youth whispers, holding out his glass. ‘He’s Jesus superstar.’

  The worn door at Muriel’s black-satined back swings open. In comes a new card, cheeky hat acock, eyes swiftly taking in the room.

  Muriel turns her severely beautiful head, ready as ever to assert her authority over her den.

  ‘You can take that hat off right away. Not in here, dear. Hats are not de rigueur. How d’you like my bit of parlayvoo, dear, is it alright? No, not you, dear, you wouldn’t know a French word from an arsehole, dear. Perfect is it, dear? I always said culture must have rubbed off on me during all me long years in this refined club. Not the only rubbing that’s been going on is it, dear? Ooh look how she drops her eyes. All fucking blushes and cream, dear. Cream’s not in it. It’s alright, dear, I’ll shut up now. I’ve got a sore throat that could do with a bit of a rest. You can look up, dear. No one’s going to ask you what you’ve been rubbing.’

  ‘Got a bit of a sore froat, have you then, love?’ queries the new arrival, hatless now, firmly nursing a drink.

  ‘Yes, sore throat. You know me, dear, sucking cocks in furnished rooms. You remember me – come on, now, dear.’

  The newcomer flashes a mirthless laugh then scrutinizes the room for someone evidently not there.

  ‘You’ve not seen Miranda then have you, love?’ he asks.

  ‘A pleasure we haven’t had in some time,’ says Muriel. ‘She’s too grand for the likes of us really you know, dear. Ever since she took up with that what’s his face, dear? You know the one that’s been in all the papers talking about how brave he was in the war against Miss Hitler. Anyway, someone told me that a couple of nights back they had an orgy at his place. All ballock naked, dear, a dozen or so they were. They say Miranda was having it away non-stop, on the old dining-room table if you please, dear. Or against it. I’m sure she likes a bit of mahogany under her bum.’

  Paler, the newcomer forces a chuckle and all of a sudden is no longer there.

  Having absorbed these fresh confidences, the colossus lets out a booming laugh. Here was truth. Here was how people really were, if only they’d admit it. Guts didn’t lie, man.

  ‘That’s what I’d really like, more than all you superstars,’ he says, with a toothy leer, ‘bit of cunt spread out on the table.’

  ‘You can keep your trap shut for a start, dear,’ Muriel retorts sharply. ‘You only open it to let out a load of ballocks. If any cunt comes in here, dear, it’ll be for me. I’m chief cunt-catcher here aren’t I, daughter?’

  Francis raises his glass in assent and toasts her with a tender, glistening smile.

  After a long session at Muriel’s there can be no odder place to be spending the night than at the Athenaeum on Pall Mall. I was told the moment I entered the neoclassical portal and stood gazing up at the great central staircase that I ‘will be needing a jacket and tie at all times in the public areas, Sir’. After a good look round, I discovered that most of the other club residents weren’t wearing ties at all, but dog-collars, and I was tempted to make a joke of it with the porter until I met his steadfastly unamused gaze. The libraries and the drawing room on the first floor are magnificent, but the bedroom I’ve been given is as poky and comfortless as the one I had at school. The divines, who tend to be tall and thin with big red bony hands poking out of their dark jackets, are very cordial and constantly grinning, as if we were all playing parts in a farce as we cross in the dining room or meet on the stairs. It is something of a farce, but they seem to take to it with much more gusto than me, cheerfully accepting the creaking beds and the clanking pails of the cleaners who wake us all just after dawn – some five minutes, it seems to me, since I came back from my odyssey in Soho. As it happens, I nearly stayed out even later because, after leaving Francis, I was invited by a husky female voice in a doorway to another kind of gentlemen’s club just upstairs. I hesitated for a moment, then just in time I remembered the photographer David Bailey telling me once how he had been propositioned by a hostess in a similar joint: ‘I don’t come ’ere for sex, love,’ he’d told her. ‘I come ’ere for degradation . . .’ I walked past, determined to return to my clerical friends instead.

  I should have much preferred to be sleeping on David’s sofa, which I consider my real home in London, but he has left on a trip abroad. Actually I now have my own club in London, and I don’t mean the Colony or the other
Soho drinking clubs I’ve signed up to. I probably wouldn’t have thought of it, but when Alice announced that she had never known an Englishman who didn’t belong to a gentlemen’s club I thought I’d better conform to type and I joined the Oxford and Cambridge as the one I had the best chance of getting into. They’re closed now for the summer but they offer a number of ‘reciprocal’ clubs for their stranded members to eat and sleep in. After roaming round the Oxford and Cambridge and discovering all its nooks and crannies, including a small ‘Silence Library’ where all talk is forbidden and a weighing-seat where you add various brass weights until the scales balance (and tell me that I’ve put some weight back on), I have grown increasingly curious about the other clubs that line the southern side of Pall Mall. After all my years of living in France, this is where, behind the august façades and members-only barrier, I think I can find the secret heart of my own country, faintly beating. So in idle moments I’ve been prowling around as many clubs as I can, noting their idiosyncrasies, such as card tables with niches cut out to accommodate prominent bellies, and savouring the strangeness of enfilades of empty, smelly reception rooms, smoking lounges, members’ bars and ladies’ annexes, many of them commanding choice views over the West End. Nothing is more startling in these inaccessible spaces than to come across another human being, either asleep or possibly dead in a dark library or, even more disturbingly, alive and prowling around the premises like oneself in suspended wonderment that such privileged, forgotten retreats still exist.

  The Athenaeum’s public rooms are particularly impressive, and knowing that Francis likes grand spaces – he often harks back to ballrooms and large, bow-windowed drawing rooms in country houses he knew in Ireland – I’ve asked him to come here and have a drink in the bar, which is exotically and bizarrely decorated with embossed gold wallpaper. I’ve made sure that a good champagne is on ice, but when Francis arrives he says he’d like a whisky, which I hope means he’s had too much champagne rather than an attempt to keep my minor expenses down. We then move around the club, whisky in hand, until we find a comfortable place to sit in the drawing room overlooking the club’s garden. I’ve been expecting Francis to mention that he knows the Athenaeum well since one of the most important men in his life, Eric Hall, was a member and must have come here frequently with his young companion. But I’ve also noticed that Francis has regular lapses of memory these days, perhaps particularly after heavy drinking bouts, and I remember the last time we had dinner in Paris at a very fancy, Michelin-starred establishment where we’d been before (and where they address him as maître, which he hates), he resolutely denied ever having eaten there, even when they brought out their livre d’honneur for him to sign and we both noticed his signature already there, scrawled on the opposite page of pretentious-looking mock parchment.