Francis Bacon in Your Blood (30 page)

Francis says he loves being down there because the house gives directly on to the Thames and you get all the boats going to and fro and there's this marvellous pub called the Grapes just next door that's been there since the sixteenth century. It all sounds really exotic to me, sitting beside the phone and looking out on my quiet little street in the Marais. Dan Farson's singing pub, the Watermans Arms, isn't far away, Francis reminds me (although
Dan himself has moved on), and there's Charlie Brown's famous watering-hole on West India Dock Road. Francis bought the house on a whim before George's death and had it done up the way he wanted, making the most of the big windows going down the whole of the back that overlooks the river. But after several attempts he's found it impossible to work there, he says, because there's so much moving light thrown up by the water. ‘Everything seems to be flickering and in constant motion the whole time,' he tells me ruefully. So now the house is simply lying empty and he's wondering whether Alice and I might care to move in there at some point for a few weeks or for however long we wanted, really.

The first lunch I took Alice to at what I thought might be a suitable restaurant – the cheaper annexe or
petite soeur
to the grand Chez Francis brasserie beside the Pont de l'Alma – cost me the equivalent of a week's work, and Alice always referred to it thereafter as our first lunch ‘Chez Francis
pauvre
'. So I have a lot to live up to and imagine that I might cut a little more ice by offering a stay in Francis Bacon's newly redesigned house overlooking the Thames. Alice is delighted by the whole idea and without thinking too much about what we were going to do with ourselves in the East End of London, which I barely know and she not at all, we throw a couple of suitcases into her car and drive to Calais for the Channel crossing.

It's late afternoon by the time we find our way to Narrow Street, and we are amazed to find an immaculate Georgian terrace house with a jetty and three large, luminous floors all looking out directly on to the Thames. The sun is playing on the water and I see right away how the constant dazzle would make painting difficult. It would in fact be difficult to concentrate on anything given the continuously changing spectacle on the river outside. The traffic is incredible, with everything from huge barges, tugs and patrol boats to luxury yachts and liners threading through each other on the choppy waters in both directions. Then later in the evening all activity
ceases, and the only sound you hear is the cry of the gulls as they swoop down in search of food.

We luckily don't have to forage because Francis has filled the large fridge with a complete range of food from Harrods as well as several bottles of Krug. Alice is impressed by the pot of caviare and the large game pie. Looking round the house, with its sanded wood floors and brushed steel staircase, I can see that although he lives in what he calls ‘squalor', Francis hasn't lost his touch as a decorator. At the opposite extreme to the clutter in his own studio, Narrow Street has been kept to a minimum of functional furniture and recalls the interiors Francis himself designed at the outset of his career. On the top floor the bedroom, to Alice's alarm and my amusement, contains a gleaming white bathtub and a lavatory in the same space as the bed, so that every intimacy is shared. What must have been impossibly avant-garde in the early 1930s still shocks some forty years later.

The phone rings the next morning and it's Francis asking if we're alright and have everything we need. He tells me his sister Ianthe is over from South Africa and very curious to see the Narrow Street place. I immediately suggest that Alice and I organize a lunch party, but Francis beats me to it by saying he has to go back to Harrods anyway to pick something up so he'll bring all the lunch food down by taxi – and had I seen there are a couple of cases of Lynch-Bages and Ducru-Beaucaillou under the deal table in the kitchen? We decide to invite Sonia as well and my old friend David Blow, whom Francis has met several times and whose regular news broadcasts he listens out for on the BBC World Service because he finds them ‘marvellously clear'. He also mentions with relish that he's been following the whole Lord Lucan case in the news, and I realize Francis probably knows him from one of the gambling clubs he goes to. Certain scandals appeal to him hugely, and he's been saying for some time that he's heard from a very good source there was a ‘fourth man' in the whole Philby affair who hasn't been named yet.

We're lucky enough to have perfect weather for the lunch and we sit out on the jetty with the champagne. Francis is looking considerably better than when I last saw him, and he's clearly proud that the house is so much more to his sister's taste than ‘my dump in Reece Mews'. The party lasts right through the afternoon, and apart from Francis, for whom it's an everyday experience, we've all drunk far more than we're used to. David has kindly offered to take Ianthe and Sonia back to South Kensington and Alice has gone to take a nap, so Francis and I wander out and are soon on the whisky in a rather grim-looking pub he seems to know. I'm surprised how he seems quite as much at ease in this dank boozer, which is still quite empty, as in the luxury of his own house, and I'm taken back even more when he suggests that I might need some extra money to take Alice out during our stay. I colour and refuse gratefully but primly, saying that he's already given us all the hospitality we could possibly want. Without missing a beat, Francis goes on to tell me how much George liked this pub and all the East End characters and villains who drink here. He's still pale, but he laughs more often and some of the old rosiness has come back into his face. We've settled with our single malts at a rickety table in the corner and seem to be on the verge of another of our ‘in-depth' conversations. It's as though Francis thinks I'm still writing that interview we began a good ten years ago.

‘The thing is, I suppose I could tell everything, because it would be much better when one's talking about oneself to tell the whole story rather than just bits of it,' Francis says, while quickly scanning the two new clients ordering their drinks at the bar. ‘But if I did I'd probably end up with an arm cut off or my eyes put out. It sounds a very vain thing to say but by a series of accidents, they were just accidents, my life has been extraordinary. Much more interesting than my paintings. It's been a ridiculous life as well, of course.

‘But I don't know how you could ever go about putting those things down, Michael, even in an interview or an article. In a
way I suppose writing must have become as difficult as painting. The same complex question of recording, yet undercutting mere anecdote. It would take a Proust to know how to do it. It's something I could never write myself, naturally. I can't even write a letter.

‘In that sense it would be interesting if you could talk about these gangsters I happened to know, the Krays, because they were really curious. Of course they were dreadful, just killing people off and so on, and it's a good thing they've been put away, but at least they were really different from everybody else. They were prepared to risk everything. One of them was quite mad. The queer one, Ronnie. I would never have known them if this actor I used to see, Stanley Baker, when I was living for a bit in Tangier, hadn't come round to me one day and said, “Francis, I've got these friends over from England and can I bring them round to your place for a drink?” And I said yes of course. So then he turned up with the whole dreadful gang of them. I suppose he thought it was terribly smart to know them. Anyway afterwards one of them, the really nasty one of course, came to me and said, “Francis, I've got this friend” – he'd fallen for some Spanish boy – “and I don't feel I can take him back to the hotel, can I bring him round to your place?” So I said, “Well, as it happens I don't think hotels here mind about that sort of thing.” But he said he was worried about the impression it might make, though you would think that after cutting all those throats he wouldn't have cared. Anyway, I had a place with lots of rooms at the time so I said, “If you want to you can bring him here.” Well, he did, and after that I never saw the end of him. Naturally. He always seemed to be there.

‘For some strange reason someone told him it was a good thing to buy my paintings. One of their gang actually came round to see me with four hundred pounds in his pocket. I remember that seemed a fortune to me at the time, but as it happened I had nothing to give him. Together the two of them had this incredible power. Of course they're still very powerful
now, even though they're what's called behind bars. Because they have these “lieutenants” still under their orders, so they can reach beyond prison, as it were, even now. The mad one, he used to go completely mad, he would just kill anyone, was the more, I know it sounds a terrible thing to say, but he was the more remarkable of the two. The more deeply curious.

‘One of the ones who worked for them broke into my studio and stole some paintings once. I suppose he'd been told they were worth a lot of money – the newspapers had printed a story about their selling for colossal sums. Anyway he'd been hanging around the studio for some time. He just wanted money I think, because at night there used to be this tap-tap-tap on the door, the whole time, tap-tap-tap, well it went on and on, and I was too bored by the whole thing to go down and open up to him. I could probably have given him something and he would have gone away. Anyway. It was a great nuisance in the end, because he took some pictures that I terribly didn't want to let out of the studio because they were very bad. Well, you know how those things are: there was just no trace of them at all. And then about a week later, I had to go and see my framer, you know, Alfred Hecht. And there he was, showing Alfred the pictures.

‘He'd just that moment been trying to see whether he could sell them. When I came in he took them and ran out. But that wasn't the end of it. It never is with that kind of thing. The next day I went back to the studio in the afternoon and I found them all in there, the whole gang of them, just sitting round waiting, and there was that really nasty one saying to me how long it had been and how nice it was to see me again and so on. Of course I didn't know what to do, so I asked them whether they'd all like a cup of tea. And they said they would, so I made them some and we all sat round and they were terribly polite, and just sat there drinking their tea, but when they got up to go there was no doubt what they meant to tell me. So all I could do was drop the whole thing. A bit later, I did manage to get the pictures back, but I had to pay some ridiculous sum of money to buy them at
auction. Well, then I was able to destroy them and have done with it.

‘In the end, when the police had enough on them to bring them to trial, one of these lieutenants of theirs came to me and said, “I can't turn evidence against the twins, can you give me the money just to disappear?” So I gave him the money, and he did disappear. I haven't heard of him since. But one day he could simply turn up again. That's the boring thing about people like that. You never know when they'll turn up again. I have to say that deep down I hated the idea of what they did to people. In a restaurant in Tangier, I once saw them force a man to go down on his knees and kiss their shoes in front of everybody. Well, there it is. For some reason I often seem to come across people like that. I suppose, like John Deakin says, it's because of what's called “the company she keeps”.

‘I still hear from them now that they're in prison. They send me these paintings they do there. They're very odd. They're always of these kinds of soft landscapes with little cottages in them. The thing is that's just the kind of life they always wanted. A life of ease in the country.'

The pub has begun to fill up. Some of the regulars are eyeing us, openly wondering who we are and what we're doing. Francis has decided to continue the evening at Muriel's and invites me and Alice to come with him, but I claim that Alice is still recovering from the long drive from Paris and wave goodbye as he gets into a taxi to go back up west.

My father wants to have what he calls a ‘family conference', which would include not only me and my sister, but any other relative he can persuade to come to Stocking Pelham, the inaccessible village in Hertfordshire where he and my mother are living out their retirement years. I recoil from the idea but I can't see how I can not go without creating a major fuss. My mother has told me he's in the middle of his manic phase and
that everything's been planned, right down to organizing the travel for everyone lucky enough to have been summoned. No one knows why my father has had this idea or what it's about, but my aunt Yvonne and my uncle Mike, the two siblings of his I get on with best, have already accepted. My mother has also mentioned that my father's health has not been good and that he's been to the hospital in Bishop's Stortford several times for ‘tests'. This worries me and makes me feel obscurely guilty. When the tickets arrive by post, I realize I have no choice, and I call my friend David to make sure he can put me up for a couple of nights in London.