All the Hopeful Lovers (23 page)

Take me into the bedroom. Lie me on the bed.

Don’t ask me to make any decisions. I’m not in control any more. This is what I came for. As if I didn’t know, from the moment outside Alice’s house when he said, ‘Do you ever come up to London?’

Now he’s paid, and the waiter’s getting her coat.

I don’t have to do anything. Not a fucking thing.

Christina paces up and down the drab walkway. To one side, the grey back of the Queen Elizabeth Hall; to the other the low concrete and glass block of the Hayward Gallery. Between the two the curving concrete walls of a stairwell rise up like a defensive pillbox, a pillbox painted a startling cherry-red. How did that happen? Did it dawn one day on the keepers of this dismal domain that they had overdone the grey? If so, why stop at the stairwell?

London buses rumble by over Waterloo Bridge, pulses of red between the concrete and the sky. Above, a flat layer of dull grey cloud. A hint of rain in the chill air.

Through the windows of the gallery café, which is defiantly called Concrete, she can see her crew waiting for her, drinking coffee. On the wall above, the title of the current show is spelled out in big neon letters: BREAK OUT. Visitors are drifting in and out of the Hayward lobby, muffled against the cold, speaking in low voices. Not exactly a crowd-puller.

Her phone buzzes. The driver of the car she sent to Sussex. He has Anthony Armitage on board, he’s close now. Maybe ten minutes.

Christina paces because she’s nervous. If all goes according to plan this morning the old man will deliver a violent and theatrical response to Joe Nola’s art; which will provide her with a much-needed climactic scene for her television film. But in doing so it might damage beyond repair her relationship with her subject, Joe Nola.

What relationship is that, exactly? Here lies the source of her tension. It seems to Christina that two futures lie before her: one, a life with Joe, in which their teasing companionship deepens into a tender and lasting love; the other, a career as a maker of acclaimed arts documentaries. The trouble is, the one precludes the other. Joe Nola can be her subject or her lover, but not both.

So the minutes tick by, and the car rolls ever closer, and Christina, pacing, unaware of the cold, puzzles over this latest fork in her destiny.

How ambitious am I? How successful do I want to be?

The answer is: it all depends. If her work is to be her life, then let it be the best, let it bring her fame and fortune. But if there’s a chance of love …

Why does it have to be a choice? Why not both? Because life’s a bitch. Because no one gets everything. Because love leads to babies and then you’re gone. She’s seen her friends disappear into motherhood, that alien land where she can’t follow them until she too is a mother. A mother! Thirty-one years old and a few years’ grace still, but how long does it take to meet the right man? And how long before you know each other well enough to make promises that bind you for the rest of your life? Two years? Five? It’s almost too late already to start from scratch with a perfect stranger. Your future partner, your husband, had better be close at hand right now. He’d better be someone you know and have probably known for a while. For example, Joe.

The man himself now emerges from the gallery, driven from the modernist warmth by the need for a cigarette. He comes over to her side, his slender fingers expertly at work on a roll-up.

‘How’s Leni Riefenstahl this morning?’

‘How’s the impish-dissonant-sublime?’

This is a reference to one art critic’s summary of his work.

‘Shouldn’t the old man be here by now?’

‘Any minute.’

She’s told Joe about Armitage’s visit. Also Bill Lennox, the gallery director. But she hasn’t told them what she expects to ensue.

‘Guess what?’ Joe lights his roll-up, cupping his hand against the wind. ‘I’m actually looking forward to seeing the old bugger.’

‘I don’t think he’ll like the show.’

‘No, of course not. He’ll hate it. I don’t care. I owe him anyway. He was the first person who ever made me believe I had something.’

Christ, the old man’s his father-figure. And he’s going to smash his work with a hammer.

‘He’s quite an angry old man, you know.’

‘Great. Good for him. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”’

‘What?’

‘Dylan Thomas.’

Christina realizes with sudden clarity that she’s going to have to prepare Joe for what’s coming.

‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘he really hates modern art. What if he were to go berserk in the gallery?’

‘Rage is a legitimate response. Actually it’s more or less traditional these days.’

‘What if he were to start hitting out with a hammer?’

‘A hammer! Has he got a hammer?’

This precise, not to say concrete, question has in fact occurred to Christina. As a film maker she prides herself on her planning, on her attention to detail. Which is why she has taken the precaution of packing a hammer in her work bag.

‘He might have.’

Joe gives her his impish-dissonant-sublime look.

‘Darling one. Are we by any chance sprinkling a little
very
into the
verité
?’

Christina can maintain her innocence no longer. She has willed her own exposure, from the moment she uttered the word ‘hammer’.

‘It’s all his own idea. Though just in case.’

She opens her bag and lets him have a peek. Joe is entranced.

‘An actual hammer! Art criticism
à la outrance
. What a mensch! You’ll film the act, of course?’

Sweet relief floods through Christina. The two paths of her bifurcated future rejoin. One high road now, heading into the sunset.

‘But what about your installation?’

‘I offer it as a sacrifice.’

‘Seriously? You don’t mind?’

‘I don’t give one little itty-bitty fuckity-fuck.
Vita longa, ars brevis
.’

‘You are so sickeningly educated, Joe.’

‘You can thank the Jesuits for that. Belvedere College, Alma Mater of James Joyce, Terry Wogan, and me.’

‘If he really does it it’ll make my film.’

‘Anything to further your career, gorgeous. And of course, mine. Our fates are entwined.’

Such a wicked smile as he says this.

‘I adore you too, Joe.’

And she does. But the words have no purchase on reality. Impossible to know what he really feels.

‘We’d better alert Bill Lennox,’ says Joe.

‘No way!’ says Christina. ‘He’ll never let us.’

‘Leave him to me,’ says Joe.

They catch Bill Lennox in his office furtively watching an episode of
Entourage
on his iPhone.

‘Doesn’t anyone knock any more?’ he says irritably.

‘No porn in office hours, Bill,’ says Joe.

‘It’s not porn. It’s contemporary culture. Go away.’

Joe outlines the plan for the morning’s entertainment. Bill Lennox laughs a lot and then says, ‘You don’t expect me to go along with this, do you? It’s an open invitation to every fruitcake in town.’

‘That’s just it,’ says Joe. ‘It’s not an open invitation. It’s a closed invitation. It’s a scheduled art event. We can write the press release now. Artists Joe Nola and Anthony Armitage collaborate in an act of creation-slash-destruction et cetera et cetera.’

Lennox stares at him.

‘Are you serious?’

‘So help me God.’

‘What if someone gets hurt?’

‘He’s over eighty, Bill. It’s a hammer, not a Kalashnikov.’

‘I’d have to bring in extra security.’

‘Bring in the SAS if you want. Just tell them to stay cool.’

‘And you’re going to have to sign something for me, Joe. I’m not having one of your what-little-me? acts afterwards.’

‘You know your trouble, Bill? You’re a fucking bureaucrat. Show some fucking cojones. This’ll have the punters queuing round the block.’

In the lift back up to the lobby Christina is awestruck.

‘Joe, you were magnificent.’

‘Just doing my job,’ says Joe. ‘All in a day’s work for Artistman.’

Christina briefs the film crew in the café. Two South Bank security men show up and stand around in the lobby looking conspicuous. Christina’s phone rings. The car is arriving.

She takes the lift to the ground floor and hurries out through the gloomy car park to the open space behind the Royal Festival Hall. A light rain has started to fall. She waits under the concrete overpass beside an immense skip, watching the great wheel of the London Eye, trying and failing to see it actually turning.

A black Mercedes turns the corner from Belvedere Road. She can see the muffled figure of Anthony Armitage in the back. The Mercedes comes to a stop in the middle of the road. Christina goes out into the drizzle to tell the driver to go on into the Hayward car park. It’s the kind of rain that totally screws your hair, but what can you do?

The barrier rises. The Mercedes pulls to a stop just past the rank of parked motorbikes. The rear door opens and Anthony Armitage gets out of the car very slowly. He’s wearing a navy blue felt overcoat like an over-long donkey jacket, and a black Homburg hat. He looks older and frailer than she remembers. As he straightens up, reaching for the car door to steady himself, his eyes look round with an uncomprehending and fearful gaze. He’s not wearing his glasses.

‘Where am I?’

‘This is the Hayward Gallery car park.’

He stares at the receding parking bays punctuated by concrete pillars. The ghosts of dimly lit cars. Then he fumbles in a pocket and pulls out a card.

‘For you,’ he says, pressing it into Christina’s hand. ‘Come to my show.’

Christina puts the card into her bag without looking at it. She steers him into the bowels of the car park.

‘There’s a lift.’

He enters the steel box with reluctance. He appears to be overwhelmed by his surroundings. He has closed his eyes.

‘Are you all right? We’ll be there in a minute.’

The lift doors open into the gallery lobby. Seeing it now through his eyes Christina is struck by the joylessness of the space. No grandeur, no colour, no wit. Even the crowd gathered round the entrance to the display rooms are sombre in appearance, clad mostly in greys and blacks.

The old man stands staring at the name of the show: BREAK OUT.

‘Break out,’ he says, forming the words slowly, like a child learning to read.

She offers to take his coat, get him a coffee. He shakes his head.

‘All I need is a piss. Bloody bladder.’

She leads him to the men’s lavatory. By the doorway she whispers, ‘Do you have a hammer?’

‘A what?’

She takes the hammer from her bag and slips it into his overcoat pocket. It takes him a moment to realize what she’s done. Then a smile creases his much-creased face.

‘Pinoncelli,’ he murmurs.

Christina gives the cameraman a discreet sign to turn over as Anthony Armitage emerges from the toilet. She guides him to the gallery where Joe Nola’s installation is on display. The room is packed. Word has spread. The old man, unaware that he is the exhibit they have come to see, pauses before the panel of explanatory text.

‘
Break Fast
.’ He reads out the heading. ‘I can manage that. The rest is too small.’

‘Do you want me to read it for you?’

‘I think you’d better.’

So she reads it aloud to him while the soundman holds his furry blimp in the air between them.

‘My work explores the tension between self-slash-other—’

‘What what what?’

‘Self-slash-other.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know the slash sign? The diagonal line you put between words to mean either-or?’

‘Either self or other.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Go on.’

‘The tension between self-slash-other in the medium of memory. Nostalgia is private-slash-shared—’

‘Either private or shared.’

‘Art is the slash that separates-slash-joins you-slash-me.’

‘Either separates or joins either you or me.’

‘The artist-as-child is made universal by brand magic, by in this instance the sacrament of Kellogg’s Cornflakes.’

She waits for his gloss, but he says nothing. He seems to be listening attentively. She goes on to the end.

‘The table an altar, the meal a Mass. True art is the priesthood of all believers.’

She falls silent.

‘Is that it?’ he says.

‘That’s it.’

‘Deep, isn’t it? Challenging. Makes you think.’

Christina’s heart sinks. She wants anger, not irony. But he hasn’t seen the exhibit yet.

‘Joe was brought up a Roman Catholic, you know,’ says Anthony Armitage. ‘A flying start for an artist.’

The crowd parts before him. This should be a giveaway but he seems not to notice, cocooned in his long dark overcoat. He moves slowly towards the platform on which stands Joe Nola’s work of art. Joe himself, Christina notes, has appeared in the doorway to watch.

The cameraman crouches before the old man, under instruction to capture his earliest responses to the installation. But the old man seems to have no response. He looks at the fully-laid breakfast table with an expressionless gaze, registering but not judging.