This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  Lead-grey, clotted cream, sand: there was a kind of grace in the way Braque had shunned anything primary or obvious.

  ‘I don’t think it was ugly at all,’ I say. ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Well, I never liked it,’ Ralph says.

  ‘All the more reason for me to have it then.’

  Ralph sighs.

  ‘I mean, it was a Braque,’ I say.

  Ralph leans over the table, hands clasped in front of him, and I see a side of him I haven’t seen before. He has a ruthless streak; he can be unwavering, dismissive. Suddenly I can imagine him in a boardroom, closing a deal. The hands calm and resolute, the faint curl of the upper lip. The occasional cunning sideways glance … Is he relishing the fact that he has outmanoeuvred me? Or is he merely thinking I have brought this on myself? Because he’s right. I have. Robin and I have been quite content to let Ralph assume responsibility for the probate. It’s Ralph who has been doing all the work.

  ‘You can’t have been that bothered about it,’ he says, ‘or you wouldn’t have gone away for so long.’

  A spark of anger glows, and is then extinguished. Do I really want the lithograph? If so, why not drive down to Edgar Horn? I could find the person in charge and explain that there has been an error. I could talk about a family in mourning, a difficult time, irrational behaviour. I could apologize for the misunderstanding, offer to refund the money. Surely, given the circumstances, they would not object. But even as the idea occurs to me, I know I won’t make the slightest effort to retrieve the Braque. What will I do? Nothing. There is a lot, it seems to me, that I’m not doing.

  The lithograph has gone, I tell myself. Things of great value are always disappearing, never to be seen again. Things I love. Well, perhaps I’m not supposed to have them. Perhaps I should stop trying to hold on. After all, how much of the past does anybody really need to keep? Though this argument strikes me as perfectly valid, I can’t help noticing my anger has flared up again. I wanted the Braque. I wanted it.

  Later that day, I check my copy of the letter that accompanied Dad’s will. Given the care with which he allocated items as mundane as a slide projector or a radio cassette, it seems inconceivable that he could have disregarded the lithograph, but I go through all five pages and fail to find a single reference to it. Was he uncertain about who to leave it to? Or, aware of its worth, was he unwilling to favour one of his children over all the others? I raise the subject with Robin after Ralph and Vivian have gone upstairs to bed. Robin thinks it was an oversight: Dad just forgot.

  In that same letter, Dad talked about his pictures. He appeared to accept that we wouldn’t be able to keep his entire output – concerning my paintings, you must do your best to be fair, he wrote, but I understand that some will be destroyed – yet in those measured words I seem to hear a note of disappointment, a thinly concealed plea. He always believed his work had merit, even if the art world and the general public chose to ignore it.

  Dad’s pictures fall into several categories. In the fifties and sixties he painted female nudes. The hair is always long, straight and dark brown, with a centre parting and a fringe. The breasts are small and round, with a space between them, and the pubic triangle is a neat, inverted pyramid. Now that I look at the pictures again, I see something of Sonya in them, even though Dad had yet to meet her. In the strong, slim body and the shapely legs, there are clear echoes of my mother too. This woman who he returned to again and again must have corresponded to his ideal. I don’t remember a single painting of a blonde.

  His figurative work includes several landscapes, but most of what he produced was abstract. Typically, the paintings were about six feet long and two or three feet high, and since he couldn’t afford canvas, the oils were applied directly on to sheets of hardboard. The slashes and dribbles of colour, which seem lifted straight from Jackson Pollock, were sometimes imprisoned behind a lattice of harsh black lines. Dad made his own frames, using narrow strips of pine, and there would be a small square of white paper on the back of every picture, on which he would write the title, the year and a price. His titles are as abstract as the art – ‘Convergence’, ‘Resolution’ – but it is the prices that upset me most. They’re so optimistic, so notional; I’m not sure he sold more than one or two pieces of work in his entire life.

  In the seventies, he entered what he only half-jokingly called his ‘Lines-and-Balls’ period. These pictures are smaller, but the titles remain obscure. Every time I arrived back home at the end of term, I would have to go and look at what he had done while I had been away. Positioning myself in front of ‘Balance’, a large monochrome Lines-and-Balls painting he had hung inside the sitting-room door, I remember tilting my head, as I had seen people do in galleries.

  ‘What do you think?’ Dad was behind me, in his red chair, peering over the top of his half-moon spectacles.

  ‘I quite like it.’

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded. ‘Not bad.’

  When I turned to face him, he was smiling.

  ‘Well done,’ he said.

  He looked proud – not of himself, but of me. Was it because I had seen some value in his work, or because I had been loyal?

  Once, in the late sixties, Cyril Connolly came to our house. His daughter had been playing with Ralph that afternoon – they were in the same class at school – and he had dropped in to pick her up. I watched him pause in front of a painting called ‘Summer’. With his monumental bald head and his shapeless grey plastic mackintosh, Cyril Connolly seemed to fill the sitting-room, an effect I put down to the fact that he was famous. He spent at least a minute studying the clustered dabs of red and blue while Dad and I hovered anxiously in the background.

  ‘One of yours?’ he enquired eventually, and without taking his eyes off the painting.

  Dad admitted that it was.

  ‘Charming,’ the great man said. ‘Quite charming.’

  For Dad, as an artist, this was a moment of glory, and he would often refer to it in the years that followed: ‘Well, as Cyril Connolly once said …’

  I decide to keep ‘Summer’, and I also keep two Lines-and-Balls paintings that used to hang in my bedroom, along with a number of Dad’s later efforts, which were executed on the back of Christmas cards, or the inside of cereal packets, or on the covers of the annual reports of companies in which he had shares. Once we have made our own selections, we ring all the people who knew Dad, asking them to take as many paintings as they like, but even after everyone has been, dozens of works remain, and we store them upright against the back wall of the main glasshouse, ready for the inevitable fire.

  I stand in the glasshouse, going through the stacks of unwanted paintings. What do I think of Dad’s work – really? If I set my loyalty aside, I suppose what I see is a lack of authenticity, a failure of nerve. He seemed either unwilling, or unable, to engage with his own intense emotions, but perhaps the events that so utterly derailed his life were too painful for him to contemplate, let alone explore. He could only try and forget. His art, too, was all about looking away.

  According to the local paper, the Curzon is showing the film of David Bowie’s 1973 concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. I pass the paper to Robin. We reminisce about how we thought of going to that concert, and then decided against it, worried that seeing Bowie on stage might be a let-down. We have regretted the decision ever since, especially as Bowie chose that night to announce – prematurely, as it turned out – that he would never play live again. Robin says the film is supposed to be good, and when the weekend arrives, we equip ourselves with cigarettes and pre-mixed bottles of vodka-and-orange, and drive downtown.

  The Curzon has seen better days. The air is motionless and stale, like stored breath, and when I take my seat I can feel springs poking through the bald red plush. The lights dim; I look around. Apart from us, there are only three or four people in the cinema.

  The film opens with Bowie sitting in front of a mirror in his dressing-room. As I watch a young woman put his m
ake-up on, I remember how I would buy each new album the moment it came out. At the end of my first year at university, I InterRailed round Europe with Diamond Dogs playing in my head, and were it not for Aladdin Sane I doubt I would have flown to America after graduating. Bowie wrote the soundtrack for that part of my life. There’s something not quite right about the film, though. The picture is fuzzy, the sound muffled. I glance at Robin. He rolls his eyes. We decide to be patient, assuming the management will notice and make adjustments.

  Five minutes pass. Bowie takes the stage with a fast, elastic version of ‘Hang on to Yourself’, but the sound and picture quality are still poor. Turning in my seat, I peer up at the small square window where the projectionist should be.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Robin says. ‘I mean, what’s the point?’

  I tell him I will go and speak to someone.

  I walk back through the curtain. There is no one standing behind the sweets counter, and the ticket booth is empty. A clock ticks above the trays of Opal Fruits and Maltesers. Its black second hand is the only thing in the foyer that is moving, which gives it a sinister quality, an air of menace. I turn slowly, in a half-circle. Beyond the popcorn machine is a man in a dark blue jacket with a long-handled dustpan and brush. Though he is looking straight at me, his eyes are blank as doorknobs. He has a five o’clock shadow that seems oversimplified, comically precise, as if, like a transfer, it came free with a packet of bubblegum and he stuck it on himself.

  ‘The picture’s out of focus,’ I tell him. ‘The sound’s bad too. Could you have a word with the projectionist?’

  The man’s eyes seem to change angle, like blinds, and he stares down at his dustpan. I’m not convinced he will do anything at all, or even that he has understood.

  Back in the cinema, I drop into my seat. The camera has turned its gaze on Bowie’s audience. Hands lift and sway in the grainy, soot-black air of the Odeon. Such light as there is seems tangerine. The people in the front row are all singing along; they know the words off by heart. The camera homes in. A girl’s face shifts almost lazily from left to right. Her mouth opens, and stays open, half in happiness, half in awe; a strand of dark hair sticks to her cheek. We should have gone. We were idiots. I swallow a mouthful of vodka-and-orange, then light a cigarette.

  Without taking his eyes off the screen, Robin moves his head towards mine. ‘What did they say?’

  I tell him about the man with the dustpan and brush. ‘I’m not sure it’s going to do any good,’ I say.

  During ‘Time’, Bowie writhes on the floor of the stage like a cat on heat. Standing over him, Mick Ronson extracts a few tortured notes from his guitar, face framed by swags of dyed blond hair, lips peeling back in a kind of anguish. The picture has improved, but the sound is still dirty and subdued.

  ‘Oh, this is crap,’ Robin says. Swivelling in his seat, he yells, ‘Turn the volume up.’

  Suddenly he seems much drunker than me. I take a long swig from my bottle, then I too shout, ‘Turn it up.’

  We carry on watching. We want to complain, but at the same time we don’t want to miss anything. The spotlight discovers Bowie on a stool with a twelve-string guitar. The camera moves closer. Looks up from below. Bowie’s face is frost-blue, and the whites of his eyes, as he gazes out into the dark, are spotless.

  ‘My death waits …’ he sings.

  ‘I love this song.’ Robin lurches round in his seat again. ‘We can’t hear it,’ he bellows. ‘Turn it up!’

  I join in.

  Sometimes the other members of the audience look at us – I can see the pale discs of their faces – and I know they’re frustrated too, and that they would also be protesting if only they’d had a bit of vodka.

  The sound level drops.

  ‘We might as well be in the foyer,’ I tell Robin.

  ‘Or out on the fucking street,’ he says.

  Robin stands, all six foot three of him. Facing the back of the cinema, he puts his hands on either side of his mouth to form a sort of megaphone.

  ‘TURN THE VOLUME UP!’

  When he takes his seat again, he looks pleased with himself, as if he thinks this might have done the trick.

  Thirty seconds pass. Nothing changes. Then, purely by chance, we both start shouting at the same time.

  ‘TURN – IT – UP!’

  After the first encore, ‘White Light, White Heat’, Bowie tells the audience that of all the shows they have done, this one will remain with him the longest, not just because it’s the last show of the tour but because it’s the last show they will ever do, and we would like to be able to savour the gasps of dismay and disbelief that follow this shock announcement, but none of it is audible.

  The second encore is ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’, Bowie’s classic closing number. Give me your hands … You’re wonderful … Robin and I drain our bottles of vodka-and-orange, then stub out our cigarettes.

  The credits roll.

  Still sitting in our seats, we both undo our flies.

  Two streams of urine rush down the slope and pool in the flat area below the screen.

  Last Nights

  It’s four-thirty in the morning, and I have just finished work. Before I go to bed, I begin another letter to Hanne. I seem to be worried all the time, I tell her. The thought of the future fills me with panic. I cross out fills me with panic. The thought of the future – what? I stare straight ahead, the garden invisible below.

  Since midnight, the wind has strengthened, and the doors and windows are rattling. It doesn’t feel like August. Bending over my letter, I tell Hanne about Rosie and Hal, who have been staying with us. When they walked out of Arrivals, clutching their little suitcases, they had name tags dangling round their necks, and I couldn’t help but see them, just for a moment, as refugees. Their quietness unnerved me. We drove south, back to the house, trees as black as burnt paper against a clear blue evening sky. I caught a glimpse of Rosie in the rear-view mirror, her face close to the window. She broke a long silence by talking about the road, and how she remembered it from all the other times. Dad would always come for them, she said. She called him Dad, just as we did.

  Their holiday coincided with the Los Angeles Olympics, and they installed themselves on Dad’s bed with the curtains drawn and the TV on, their backs against the headboard and their legs stretched out in front of them. I remember peering into the flickering gloom and asking if they were all right. Oh yes, Rosie said. We’re fine. It’s sunny, I said. Don’t you want to play outside? Though Rosie’s eyes didn’t leave the screen, she appeared to give my idea some thought. Maybe later, she said eventually. I sensed that the real answer to my question was, not really, but that she was trying not to hurt my feelings.

  When they weren’t watching the Olympics, they would wander from room to room, pointing at objects and ornaments. That’s mine, isn’t it? they’d say. Or, Dad promised to give me that. They often asked about money – how much would they be getting? – and they were curious about the house, wanting to know who owned it, and what it was worth. It can’t be normal, can it, I write to Hanne, for children to be preoccupied with such things? There were times when Robin and I thought we could hear learned lines – a voice in the background, coaching them. It seemed the only possible explanation. We already knew Sonya didn’t trust us. Why else would she have hired a lawyer? One morning in the second week, Rosie once again brought up the subject of the will, and Vivian turned on her and snapped, Stop asking about money, will you? I’m fed up with it. Rosie burst into tears. I don’t want to ask all these questions, she said, and Robin and I exchanged a glance, for here, surely, was something that appeared to confirm our suspicions.

  I tell Hanne how we lit a bonfire on one of the last nights, thinking we could have a picnic under the stars. As I walked back to the house to collect potatoes and silver foil, Rosie’s face floated through the darkness towards me. She asked if she and Hal were staying up. Of course, I said. Her eyes drifted away from me, across the garden. We want
you to say no, she said. I laughed. You want us to say no? She nodded gravely. Maybe they wished life were more like it had been when they stayed with Dad. Methodical, unvarying. Calm. In filling their holiday with spontaneity and excess, we had been thinking of ourselves, perhaps, and what we had missed in our own childhood. We had been insensitive. Naive. Still, when they went to bed, we never forgot to kiss them good night and tell them we loved them, and Rosie’s voice always followed us out of the room with the same quaint, sing-song words: Thank you for all the things.

  We organized all kinds of expeditions – the woods, the pier, the zoo, the beach – but the image that stays with me is of two children sitting side by side in the nervy black-and-silver light of the TV. They watched with such determination. They seemed so small, so lost. They looked oddly valiant. How did it feel to be back in the house where they began their lives? Did they miss their father? What could we do to make them happy? Difficult questions – and even if I were to have asked, I suspect Rosie would have tried to reassure me. We’re fine. Really. In her sublimation of her own feelings, in her transparent diplomacy, she often reminded me of myself.

  I look up from the page. Outside, it’s still dark, and the rain is coming down in sheets. I tell Hanne about the yellow patches that have appeared on the back lawn, marking the places where stepping-stones used to be during my grandparents’ time. I talk about the wallpaper in my bedroom, which has loosened to reveal elegant pink-and-gold stripes underneath. It’s as though the house is reminding us of its previous lives, its former glories. This is what you’ve turned your back on. I describe a dream I had, and a shiver zigzags through me as I write. I was standing in the hall, and the house was talking to me, asking me to stay. Though I explained the situation, the house didn’t seem to understand. Don’t leave me, it kept saying. Don’t go.

  I tried to reason with the house. We’ve got no choice, I told it. We can’t afford to stay. Its voice became louder, and more desperate. Please don’t leave. I’m begging you.