Every now and then it crossed his mind to ring Bloch, but he always decided against it; on a couple of occasions he even dialed his first few numbers, then stopped himself and put the handset down.
‘There. Finished. Who needs foam?’ said Najette, as she shook the razor vigorously in the water bowl next to her. ‘This is progress – just going back to the past,’ she went on. ‘It’s like if I started rifling through the bin I’m sure I’d find something I could market somewhere. But you know all about that – marketing. Would you care to make a statement?’
‘I never want to make statements again. Just want to talk normally or shut up.’
‘That sounds like a step in the right direction.’
She took the bowl and towel and olive oil through to the bathroom. From there she called, ‘I think I might start soon on the magnum opus. It’s all in my head; I just have to chuck it down.’
‘I think you should. You can wait too long. I’m the living proof of that. Here lies Oscar Babel who couldn’t get started.’
‘Hey, melancholy baby, no hysterics please. If you cry the tears have to land in the beer.’
Yes, no more hysterics; that was all over now. He was mature; he had to act his age, and if that meant placing a lid over his emotions so be it. No more self-pity, no more lies, no more excuses. If he couldn’t paint he couldn’t paint. Bemoaning the fact wasn’t going to change it.
Najette said, ‘I was talking to one of the locals in the off-license and he told me there’s a small wood a few miles farther out that no one knows about. You can get to it via the Kingswood footpath. Sounds enchanted. What do you think?’
‘I’m game.’
She re-emerged, her sandals flopping across the floor.
‘How does your face feel?’
‘It feels...it feels like it did when I was twelve...it doesn’t feel like I’ve just had a very good shave; it feels like you’ve made me hairless.’
‘God, maybe I should think about waxing rich California heiresses.’
She started unravelling rolls of paper and, using random objects as paperweights, spread them across the floor. Oscar peered at the studies – delicate renditions of Lilliana’s face, jostling with contiguous pencil lines, broader treatments in pencil and crayon of another face. In places, a line in ink ending in a throwaway squiggle or a wavy strand of hair in bold outline caught his eye. For him, such details were the clearest indicators of her talent. They were the kind of lines which could only be produced after years of toil, seemingly spontaneous, but the incarnation of refinement and control.
‘If you’ve worked so hard on this thing, done so many studies, it’s bound to just blaze with energy when it finally comes together,’ he said.
‘On the other hand all this preparation might kill it. It’s dangerous to make assumptions. What do you think of this?’
She unrolled a large sheet of paper and Oscar saw a square of mingled manganese blue and silver. It made for a waxen, frictionless uniformity. Oscar thought the sky might be this color if the atmosphere could be first cleansed of pollution.
‘It’s terrific,’ he whispered. ‘It’s so beautiful, eerie.’
‘It’s high density maimeri – it’s hard to get my hands on it. I’m going to use oil and india ink as well.’
‘I can’t wait to see the final painting. Can you?’
‘Oh sure. I’m used to being patient. It’s what comes of being a slow worker. I need everything to incubate and ripen, but sometimes I’ll fly by the seat of my pants, pulling something out of the hat at the last minute – and it just gives the work an extra something, makes it. But that’s scary, because I have absolutely no control over that element. That blue came from a dream I had a few nights ago.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I was on a boat. Picasso was the skipper. He had masses of black hair. We drifted along and he took me aside and started mumbling, “You’re too proud, and I’m going to tame you. I’ll tolerate female artists only when they know their place.” I didn’t really pay him much attention. Anyway, eventually we started passing through scenery with a really unreal quality to it. Everything around us was blue – a drained, plastic kind of blue. I realized the sky and the sea were made of lace or some such fabric. We moved as if through water, but actually if I leaned down to touch the water I just felt a dryness. But it was beautiful, drinking in all this color, all this blue. Then Picasso showed up again and said, “For thousands of years my name will be spoken of – now let’s get down to business.” He was got up like a matador and he was going to tame me. So before I know what’s going on I’m making out I’m a bull, prancing around and he’s flourishing this bloody great red rag. As I run up to him I can see his eyes blazing, looking at me dementedly; they looked liked they were about to pop, his face seemed to come so close. That’s when I woke up. I turned to you. I wanted to wake you but you looked so sweet I didn’t have the heart.’
‘I wish you had; I want to be there for you, do things for you.’
‘Okay then. Tomorrow you can shave my legs.’
In the bed, the receptacle of birth and death, in that rectangle of imaginings and endings, under its blankets and veils, beside each other’s limbs – additional canopies with which to wrap themselves – they experimented with each other’s bodies. Locked padlocks loosened with one accord and the derelict caverns they guarded were transformed and new life filed into them. In the night everything was alien, alienness which blew away the dust which had gathered around sensation, so Oscar and Najette were poised always to celebrate this foreign country they had newly alighted in, which sometimes yielded a glimmer of distant familiarity.
Sometimes, in the small hours, the moon spied on them. At others the night was dead and beyond the curtains there was only a black void which threatened never to fade. Sometimes they woke together to have exchanges in the dark, whispered and hushed, as though they didn’t want to disturb the imaginary person, the ghost sleeping next door.
Oscar stepped through the door, elated. He had a large box in his hand. She was at her easel.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘This is a timely reminder of my past. What I have here represents the first stirrings of the cinema. It’s a Zoetrope.’
‘What’s a Zoetrope?’
‘I was in Windsor; they were having a car boot sale at the race course. I told this man I used to be a projectionist. I told him I’d always wanted one of these things. Unfortunately he recognized me – said, “You’re Oscar Babel.” I said I wasn’t, but he kept banging on that I was. So I confessed; he started getting really effusive, suggested we have a drink and talk about life. I told him I had to go, but would he consider knocking a few pounds off the price? In the end he gave it to me for £30 – originally it was going for £50.’
‘What’s a Zoetrope?’
‘I’m going to tell you, or show you rather.’
He carefully pulled out of the box another box, on which a purple cylinder made of tin was mounted. Around the cylinder’s circumference were a number of narrow slits.
‘This is a replica of a model from 1867. You see, if you spin this drum like so and look through the slits...can you see? There’s this little man climbing some stairs...up to the sun...can you see?’
‘Oh yes, now he’s being eaten by the sun. Now he’s popping out again.’
‘Yeah, isn’t it magical? Persistence of vision – the eyes holds onto an image for a bit after it’s gone. The illusion of movement when movement is introduced. Or something.’
‘I don’t want to be unkind, Oscar, but I’m not sure I really share your excitement. Am I missing something?’
‘But this is a piece of history. I’ve always wanted one of these, and never found one. Imagine.’
‘I’m trying.’
That night Oscar took Najette’s zen pen and started drawing. It was the first time he’d drawn anything since his sketch of Nicholas. And what he drew was a series of sketches which he hoped would fa
cilitate the illusion of movement once tagged inside the Zoetrope. At first each picture jumped too wildly toward the next; so with a pencil he tried again until he had mastered a more minute level of difference from drawing to drawing. At first he just drew matchstick men juggling. Then he drew a figure with a scythe, dressed in a hood – his version of the Grim Reaper. After swinging the scythe around it became locked around its head and the final sequences showed the head dropping off. These little cartoons – trifles though they were – excited him. They represented a kind of beginning, however modest. So he stayed up all night, smoking and drawing. In the next sequence a man was seated on a lavatory seat; he started sliding; his legs got upended and he was flushed down the toilet which, at the end, had expanded to twice its width. In his next series a man was cycling; the cycle tipped up at a sharp angle; it reassembled itself until it had mutated into a cycle whose handlebars consisted of the man’s arms and his pinioned face stuck between them. In the final sequence a man was lying on a level surface; a woman appeared with an axe and started hacking off his limbs until by the end he was a stump in a sea of blood.
She inspected it, her hands clasped around her hair.
After a week it was already many things – the two faces were suspended in the foreground, crouched, floating free, mingling grief and the promise of consolation. She had tried to take the unreal beauty of her dream and superimpose it onto the background of her painting, tried to glean from her camel-haired brushes a crackless field of blue. With a razor, she scraped the paint down, then piled on further layers with brushes; then scraped them down again so that the brushstrokes faded. From this sea of glorious yet mute color, the two women emerged as if delivered from the past or future, inhabiting a still point, but perpetually poised on the threshold of departure. Then, with India ink and charcoal she began to sketch the central emblem of the plant. Underneath it she outlined in oil a complicated network of shadows thrown by the lines of spilled soil across a checked floor. These shadows were filled with triangles of color, bruised reflectors of light.
At night she covered the canvas up ritualistically, as though by sealing off her work she could the more easily forget about it until the morning.
Late next morning she wasn’t at all happy with what she saw. She went and found Oscar who was picking blackberries in the garden and dragged him to The Happy Man. It was shut. They waited outside to see if anyone would come. Eventually the publican stepped out of a clapped-out car. Like all publicans he had a substantial beer belly, under whose spherical folds a belt struggled not to disintegrate. As he opened up the pub he eyed his customers resentfully. On stepping in to his domain he grew less hostile and once he was safely installed behind the counter his lips drew back in an aberrant smile as he croaked, ‘What can I get you two?’
Oscar ordered two pints of bitter and as the barman yanked the lever with habitual wherewithal, Oscar watched for some violent, unexpected maneuver.
‘Can I order some food?’
‘Not ‘til the kitchen’s open.’
‘And when does the kitchen open?’
‘When the cook gets here.’
‘So when does the cook get here?’
‘Here are your pints; that’ll be four-fifty, please.’
Oscar took the drinks over to Najette who was halfway through a cigarette. She rummaged around for some small change and slid a twenty-pence piece into the jukebox. This elicited a frown from the barman. A few seconds later a languid, jazzy voice began to sing a song called “No Ambition.” It drew a smile from Najette which she valiantly kept up despite the radioactivity issuing from the bar. Oscar took some beer and her face gave in to consternation.
‘What’s up? You look a bit rattled, which, by the way, must be a first.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I’ve never seen you look rattled.’
She started singing the lyrics over the lispy voice.
‘“I’ve no ambition, don’t want to be seen in all the fancy places, don’t want to sail out to sea in a boat made for me.” I do get very rattled, constantly. I just don’t always choose to show it, like you do.’
‘Do I always?’
‘Yes, you’re congenitally incapable of disguising your feelings, so you wouldn’t make a good poker player. Tell me more about what it was like when you were in inverted commas.’
‘You mean when I was famous?’
‘“I’ve no ambition, I’m the humblest yet of a humble set, I only want to rule the world.”’
A party of squat, fearful-looking men with Alsatians piled in with much bluster. They greeted the barman heartily, who seemed greatly relieved to have real people gracing his establishment and soon all of them were clustered around the bar, regaling each other with anecdotes which had been told so often they had mutated into other anecdotes, and those who had told them originally no longer did, since others had inherited a particular story which they related as their own, wondering at the end if the detailed events had actually happened to them or not.
‘When you were famous, were you – “so please don’t let them take me seriously” – were you fawned on continually? Did they give you wine and roses, did they – ’
‘Let’s not talk about it, Najette; it’s over.’
‘No, go on; what did it feel like?’
‘I don’t know...I suppose...sometimes it was exciting...like I was traveling at the speed of light, and the earth was somewhere behind me and I could see it through the cockpit. But then I realized the safety hatch was open and I didn’t have any oxygen masks.’
‘The messiah as asphyxiating astronaut.’
‘You could say that.’
‘And then I pulled you out of the cockpit, gave you something real to mull over.’
‘You could say that as well.’
‘There’s no “could” about it, my dear spaceman; let’s get that clear.’
She smiled broadly, but her assurance had unsettled him.
‘What’s on your mind?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to – do you want to – sometimes I feel I have to be boundlessly grateful to you for allowing me to hook up with you – ’
Her face turned shockingly stony, and he knew with awful certainty that what he’d rehearsed in his mind prior to utterance, having been uttered, was disastrous. He scrambled after her as she made for the door, attracting glances from the clan.
‘I’m sorry...Najette...’
She turned to him at the door.
‘Oscar, that’s called over-reading – of the obnoxious, not the sensitive, sort. Can you stay out of my hair for a while?’
He toyed with the idea of making some conciliatory gesture but knew it would just tangle things further. For Najette, the remark made it clear he was capable of thinking badly of her, pointing an accusing finger, questioning her motives. Did he think she was notching up an astronomical bill which she would later present him with? But she knew there was some truth in what he’d said – and it made her wince deep down.
The clan was watching Najette with a frightful lack of discretion. As she left she threw them such a ferocious look that they collectively cleared their throats and muttered disconnectedly.
In the company of these rustic individuals and their doted-on dogs Najette’s charm and warmth impressed themselves on him at precisely the moment when she threatened to bar him access to them. How tedious people are, he thought, as he overheard starting-up scraps of conversation (the men were taking refuge in the subject of ferrets).
‘Najette.’
She was already halfway down the street.
Then the clan’s banter fizzled out. And all at once they too sagged, borne down by life, able to find relief from its flames only in the beer mug. Their disaffection resolved into an antipathy toward Oscar, who revolted them, with his effeminate features and cultivated air. They stared at him hard as he stood there lost. The dogs began giving out regular emissions which brought the atmosphere of unrest to its apotheosis and chewed on it. H
e wished their masters might produce shotguns from beneath their anoraks and aim them strategically.
‘Look, do you have a problem with something?’ he demanded.
‘That we do,’ one of them said. ‘We’re looking at it.’
Words rose to his lips mysteriously, words he could never have dreamt up at such a loaded juncture. And yet they poured out before he could stop himself.
‘Tell me: Are you dog men? Do you see the pale yellow moon in the sky? Do you see anything at all? Why the tearing of limb from limb? Give me the dogs. I can lick them into shape. Show them who’s master. Then all the other lunatics can scrape at each other over the scraps they take for gold.’
His adversary didn’t really have a response to this and was contemplating head-butting Oscar, but Oscar, sensing the violence in the air, stepped back and slipped out of the pub, leaving the locals paddling around in a bewildered sea.
Outside he drew his breath in sharply, conscious of having had a lucky escape and looked around for Najette. Clearly she wouldn’t have gone back to the house – was the best thing just to leave her alone? Obeying a random impulse he started walking down the hill toward the railway station, watchful for her slender figure, but there was no sign of it. It was a source of surprise to admit how painful the quarrel had been. He couldn’t bear the idea of hurting Najette; of, even for one moment, dishonoring a woman who was perched high up on his carefully constructed pedestal.
Meanwhile, she chain-smoked petulantly, as she marched up and down the Kingsway footpath. She knew Oscar idolized her out of all proportion; she knew also that she did not want to be idolized. She did not crave such finality, such devotion. And yet when love lost its fairy-tale élan, when it became a working relationship and the cracks and tensions widened, she inevitably grew bored, restless. She couldn’t bear the idea of love turning mundane, domesticated, sentimental. And yet it always did, which was why in the past she had had to up and go, to leave the cosy nest that one part of her wished to cultivate. The other part longed to smash it up with a witch’s broom.
The Fabrications Page 41