by Joan Taylor
“Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross,” came a chorus of children in my head, “to see a fine lady upon a white horse. With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.”
He was saying that Banbury used to be an important market centre for horses.
I watched his lips moving, the close shave of his chin, and the fine wrinkles he had under his eyes, before making sure I stared fixedly out of the window.
So these minutes wore on, as he was rehearsing his lesson about the history and the geography of the area, and I was mute. And yet in my mind, behind us, on the bed, we were lying there naked, both naked. We were kneeling, and running our fingers over each other’s skin, licking fingers, thumbs, biting earlobes, tentatively, and then at once aggressively, feeling our way around each other’s body: my body, a trifle less nubile than it had been when I posed for Denis Johns; Mr. Prain’s body, pale, lithe and strong.
It was as if the line of the nursery rhyme had unlocked an erotic peepshow. Cockhorse. Rocking horse, hobby-horse, back and forth, rhythmic riding. Riding. Cock of the walk. Cocky cockalorum. Ride a cock. Cock up.
Stop it. Stop it, I said to myself. I could not stop it. Unbridled sexual passion was happening on the bed behind us while we were staring out of the window, as he recited the history of Banbury. It felt as if the air between us had become tactile, a cushion which pressed against my left arm, shoulder, hip. Word associations and visualisations turned upon each other in a terrible convolution. I felt like I had suddenly, accidentally, opened hardcore porn on the internet when looking through innocent pictures of the English countryside. I wanted him to stop speaking so that we could hurry out of the room, and quit the imagined encounter of the couple on the bed. They kept catching my attention, quickening my heartbeat. The more I tried to listen to his historical resumé, the more I found his words sinking into a background buzz. I was stuck on the porn site. I couldn’t get out.
In the end it became excruciating, and I was forced to suppress a kind of gasp. My eyes watered with the strain, and I felt myself quiver in the attempt to keep silent and still. I felt all at once flushed in the face, and my breathing came far too fast. If he had been some distance away, he may not have noticed what was taking place, but he was near, very near, and, with his keen perception of my every movement, he immediately recognised the signs of something being stifled. He stopped speaking.
“Have I said something?” he asked.
“I …” I cleared my throat. “No, no, it was nothing,” I said. “A tickle in my throat.”
“Do you want a glass of water? My bathroom’s just here.”
“No, no. I’m fine,” I said to the window, knowing that one look towards him would shatter my fragile comportment. The effort of this made the couple on the bed vanish at last, and I was left feeling like a goofball. I folded my arms firmly.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and touched my left elbow. He might as well have applied a live wire. I jumped, stepped back in a protective reflex. I looked at him, at the ground, at the walls.
He was genuinely perplexed by the reaction.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I can do this. I thought you invited me here to talk about my work, not to show me that … photograph.” I tried to calm myself, and smiled through my wobbling composure.
“Well … I’m not being defensive,” he said defensively, “but you did agree that I should show you the house first.”
“Yes, but before. I mean … I don’t quite know what your intentions are.” I raised the pitch of my voice at the end, in Kiwi-speak fashion, so that it sounded like a question.
“My intentions?”
“Yes.” I pursed my lips and stared again, very hard, at the countryside.
He considered all this for a moment, and then said, “I do have something I want to propose to you, but you needn’t be alarmed. I do not have any dishonourable intentions. I can assure you of that. It’s simply … it’s a rather delicate matter. I’d rather not rush to the point. Please bear with me. You needn’t worry that I’ll delay you so long you’ll miss the train and be stranded here. The service from Banbury is excellent on weekdays.”
“You recognised me,” I said, remembering how he had peered at me that first day in Camden Market. “If it wasn’t for that photograph, you would never have been interested in me in the first place.”
“Yes,” he confessed. “Though I thought it was, perhaps, simply an unusual resemblance. I didn’t want to assume it was the same woman.”
“Is that why you kept coming back? You wanted to find out if I’d ever posed naked? It wasn’t because you liked me then. It wasn’t because you thought I was someone nice to spend time with.”
“I do like you, Stella, but … I am not at all intent on seducing you. Please don’t be alarmed. It’s nothing like that.” He smiled slightly, as if at a ludicrous thought. I was intrigued that he said this, that he had to make this denial. My direct questions were making him uncomfortable, and I felt sure I would only get blanket denials of any strong feeling if I so much as suggested he had any.
I had to say one more thing, though. I had not flinched from being direct with Mr. Prain when he had come to the Market. I had lost my verve with all the machinations of the afternoon. “You said you thought the woman in the photograph was very beautiful.”
This made him squirm. “You are. But I meet attractive women all the time, and I am a busy man, a very busy man.”
“Too busy for attractive women?”
“I … really. Not quite, but … I’ve actually been thinking it’s probably about time I called a halt to visiting Camden Market, of all places, and—” He stopped himself. He could have said something offensive like, “and mingle with riff-raff, drop-outs, dole-bludgers and radical activist anarchists like you.” I could see he was unsettled though. He didn’t know what to say.
“You don’t want to see me anymore there?”
He shook his head, realising he had said the wrong thing. And then he looked me straight in the eye. “You mustn’t think,” he said, “that I have any wish whatsoever to … compromise you. I ask you only to be patient. I will explain. I didn’t intend to tell you everything in three minutes flat the moment you walked in. It wouldn’t have helped. I want you to see something else first.”
“What?”
“I’ll show you now.” He gestured to the door.
“I’m glad you’ve told me this much, even if nothing makes sense,” I said, not moving immediately.
His face was solemn, quizzical. Make sense?
Sense and sensibility, I thought. He was a man of certain sensibilities. I had to respect these, and let him take me for a ride. A ride; think not upon it. I had to stop flapping.
And how to proceed from here? I became aware of the lawnmower again. After two or three attempts, it started. I smiled. “He’s fixed it,” I said.
“I beg your—”
“The lawnmower,” I said.
“Yes.” Mr. Prain seemed momentarily far away.
I was tempted to apologise for somehow prying anything out of him ahead of time, but resisted. Why apologise? I had a right to know what was happening. And yet, he was a private man. He was not the sort of man who talked about his feelings. He preferred to appear collected and dispassionate. He watched himself, but did he know himself? Did he understand his motives?
Mr. Prain appeared uncomfortable, as if he had already told me too much, perhaps prematurely, when he still did not know me well enough, while we were still engaged in a game of subterfuge and trickery.
But I, to a degree, was appeased, content, to see that he had become uncomfortable and a little lost for words. It was a fillip which enabled me to allow him to proceed in his own way, in his own time, for a bit longer. I would, out of interest and a certain kindness, allow him to recover.
He gestured again and bowed slightly, allowing me to leave the room ahead of him, as he had been taught to do for ladies, since, after all, he was a ge
ntleman. We walked out under a large, ancient pistol in a frame above the door.
chapter three | the gallery
I laughed, in surprise, and halted.
It was a sculpture.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
I was not sure. It was a statue of a Graeco-Roman god or hero, expertly carved in marble, worthy of Praxiteles. Since Mr. Prain did not forbid me, I touched it to make sure it was really marble, and not a clever plaster imitation. The figure represented a youth with a handsome face and a mass of short, wavy hair. He wore a knee-length chiton and sandals. The sinews of his muscles and veins of his arms were defined with fastidious care. His expression was both inscrutable and, somehow, proud. On his lips was an eerie half-smile that told of mysteries. But what was remarkable and alarming about the sculpture was not this neo-classical masterpiece, but the monster beside it.
The monster was really only a head which the youth held in his left hand. It was constructed out of a mass of bits of machinery, wire and plastic tubing held together with transparent glues which had dried into globules and stretches reminiscent of slime. The plastic tubes wormed all around the skull, protruding like the tentacles of some grotesque octopus, and each finished with an assortment of screws, bolts, cogs and glue that combined to give the effect of a reptilian head. In the youth’s right hand was a plastic dagger.
The juxtaposition of the classical and the mechanical, the costly and the cheap, was surprisingly disconcerting. I had lived with a sculptor, Max, for three years, and, during this time, absorbed something about the history of sculpture, but I had never seen anything like this before. While it was tempting to touch the attractive figure of the youth, I stepped back from the writhing snakes, a little worried that worse was to come. Too familiar with the idea that something constructed from nuts and bolts was designed to be powered by an engine or batteries, I feared that the entire thing would spring to life; whirring and buzzing, and snapping its jaws, with the serpents flicking out like whips.
“Perseus and Medusa,” I guessed, taking another step away.
“It’s based on the bronze cast by Benvenuto Cellini. Do you like it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not keen on post-modern sculpture?” he asked, smiling in the superior, testing manner of his mode in the study. He had recovered the composure he had lost a touch in the bedroom. The walk along hallways and down stairs had provided sufficient time.
“Post-modern, is it?” I looked at him sideways and tried to sound sceptical. I was slightly more confident now. I felt considerably bolstered and more myself. I cannot say I was relaxed, but in comparison to my disposition beside the tea table, I was in positive spirits. I was still as anxious to know his opinion of my typescripts as at the moment I stepped into his Porsche outside Banbury Station, but I could summon patience. I would play the game. “So what do you think is so definitively ‘post-modern’ about it?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s appropriating two styles of times past, the antique and the modern, and it is a reworking of a famous sixteenth-century piece, so that even the subject is second-hand. There’s no attempt to be original. In modernism, originality is almost a sine qua non, wouldn’t you say? This is self-conscious. It isn’t trying to re-create a scene of classical mythology, but rather it throws together a bit of that genre with a bit of this, for the sake of something else. Post-modern art admits it is a creation, and proposes that genre is a form of deceit. This isn’t meant to fool you. I mean, look at the plastic sword. Marvellous!”
“I thought post-modernism was passé,” I noted.
He stepped back. It seemed difficult for him to keep still. “Yes, post-modernism has become old hat in some ways, because it survives on premises that are too limited. It’s a joke that keeps being retold in different ways, the punchline being that, in this ‘post-modern’ global age, culture is made up of disparate elements that cannot be assembled into one harmonious whole. Having said that, post-modernism has made its point, and one tires of repetition. But here the joke amuses me somehow. And this was done by a special friend.”
Did that explain the sculpture’s significance? “You wouldn’t think of it conceptually?” I asked.
“No, no, not at all.”
“I see,” I said, not seeing.
“You see,” he continued, “Usually I like artists to conform to genre, because I’ve been brought up with some sort of an idea that this is an honest way to proceed. Or else,” he added dismissively, “perhaps, I just prefer to be fooled. I’m not saying that this is admirable, but I suspect one needs a wider view to understand all the permutations of culture. Post-modernism is, in the end, too mundane, too unidimensional. Pointing out that art is art and not reality is like a puppeteer, who has convinced everyone that the puppet is in some way ‘real’ and can talk, suddenly indicating that of course the puppet is a puppet. We are supposed to be very impressed at the audacity and intelligence of that. In the end, people want something more serious. We like to believe that puppets can have a conversation with the man whose hand is in the glove. I prefer pure realism, not magic realism—which is post-modernist in essence—just realism: an imaginative reality that helps us understand ourselves better.”
I found myself becoming fidgety at these remarks. I did not feel like engaging in further discussions about “isms.” Why did I have to see this sculpture?
“Really?” I said, as one does when nothing else springs to mind.
I examined the sculpture once again. I walked around it slowly. I remember it as huge, but it was not even life-size. The whole piece was small enough to fit through the doorway. It was standing on a platform so that one looked up at the faces.
And then I looked at Mr. Prain’s face, looking at the sculpture with such obvious pleasure.
This did not fit. He should have liked a purely classical sculpture, or a piece of Victorian portraiture. He liked realism, but this was not realism, at least not in toto. A joke, I thought. That was what he liked. It was an indication of his peculiar sense of humour.
“How marketable is it?” I queried, teasing.
“Good question. Not very. The British are not in general as eager to purchase or commission sculpture as the Continentals.”
“And what would you then advise your sculptor friend to do?” I said.
“Work,” he said, “of course.”
“At sculpture?”
“Indeed.”
“And earn a crust washing dishes?”
“Of course.” He smiled. I was amusing him far more than I knew.
We were in the gallery. We would have been bathed in light were it not for expansive venetian blinds over the windows which cut the streaming sun into narrow slices. Everything beneath the shadow of the blinds was striped: three Bauhaus chairs, the tubular steel standing lamp, the low mahogany table with an aluminium chess set, the grey carpet on the floor. The room was very large and, apart from the sculpture, these were the only items in it. On the creamy-coloured walls were dozens of photographs and three paintings: a Kandinsky, a Picasso and a Miro. As much as the study had been cluttered, this room was bare. The sculpture, which stood a little to the left of the door, was placed to arrest the attention as you entered. The head of Medusa gaped towards the visitor; snakes seething around the face of a robotic ghoul.
“Impressed?” he asked. My reaction to the sculpture appeared to be an important experiment. The scientist was pleased at the results. The photograph. The sculpture. “Don’t you think the expertise is astonishing. It takes extraordinary gifts to cut marble today exactly as if you were an accomplished sculptor of five hundred years ago.”
“Is this friend of yours, the sculptor, well known?”
“Not really. There have been a few exhibitions in which pieces were shown—the Summer Exhibition, for example. Did you go this year?”
“Yes,” I was able to say.
“Then you will have seen the statue of Julius Caesar moments before his m
urder. It was in the same style, only larger.”
“Oh … um …” I muttered, pretending to think.
“He was being attacked by ‘mechanical’ assailants brandishing knives.”
“Ah,” I replied, nodding. Of course I had not seen such a sculpture. My friends and I had quickly tired off the Summer Exhibition and had departed to a café at St. James, Picadilly, where we had positioned ourselves at a table under a great tree beside the cemetery, drunk coffee, and made up dramatic stories about the other people around us that suited their faces, their movements, the way they ate their food.
“I can’t say it rings a bell,” I admitted.
“Oh?” he replied, not quite believing me. “It was hard to avoid.”
Not if you only went into four rooms.
“Well …” I explained, “one gets a bit shell-shocked. One misses things. So much to look at.”
He almost frowned.
“What’s the sculptor’s name?” I asked.
This erased the lines from his brow. “Martin,” he said. “Empty Martin. A name to remember.” I had never heard of him.
“Why ‘Empty’?” I asked.
He looked at me with a bemused expression. “Why not?”
“Strange nickname,” I said.
He thought for a moment and then smiled. “Yes … yes, I suppose it is.” Then he shook his head as if there was a private joke he could not share with me. I let it pass and turned back to the sculpture.
The piece affected me. The disparity of its parts, the violence and the beauty were unsettling. Despite his analysis of its message, it did not seem to me to be a statement on culture, rather on humanity itself. The soft sensual forms of marble curved into the shape of a classically perfect man, fragile in its details, vulnerable in its grace, was one side of our condition. The jagged, menacing structure of metal, welded together, was representative of ubiquitous threats: the strong, hard things in ourselves we dare not face. We are all both hero and Gorgon. Perseus had slain Medusa, but she was the one who seemed to have the potential to move. He was made of stone. Where skin is soft and warm, the marble was cold and hard.