Francis Bacon in Your Blood (43 page)

Setsuko has brought me a traveller's English–Japanese phrase book in case there are any outstanding issues I want to address, but most of the phrases relate to requesting train times or buying a handkerchief. I ask no questions of her because I cherish the simplicity and freedom that being intimate with someone about whom one knows so little allows. We don't talk much, which is soothing while allowing us, I think, to communicate what is uppermost on our minds. After one lengthy silent supper together, Setsuko takes my hand and confides to me that she thinks I look like Bob Dylan, only less sexy.

It is almost time for Setsuko to go back to Japan and we're spending a lazy morning in the apartment when the telephone goes.

It's my mother.

‘Bad news, I'm afraid,' she says curtly. ‘Your father's just died. Massive heart attack while he was sitting with a drink in his chair.'

I put the phone down and for the first time since she arrived I really talk to Setsuko and tell her what's happened and what it means to me, and I don't know how much she understands but she clasps my head tightly to her breast and holds me there in darkness and silence for a long, long while.

Over the twenty years since I left home for good, my father became a shadowy figure. Very occasionally – for a marriage, a death or on a rare trip to Paris – we saw each other briefly, but mostly I only got news of him when I talked to my mother on the phone. I knew that his health was not good: he was overweight, he smoked and drank immoderately and all the pills he used to control his manic depression took their toll. There was also a period, not long ago, when he began bombarding my sister and me with rambling letters, full of asterisks and footnotes and arrows, and the overall tenor was that he was still searching for himself, since the necessities of life, of providing for a family while battling cyclothymia, had always denied him the time and tranquillity he needed to work it all out. He felt constantly on the cusp of this discovery, a breakthrough that would lead to a new clarity about himself and his bearings in the world. Latterly he abandoned my mother halfway through a holiday (begun grandly in a chauffeur-driven car until he suspected the driver of flirting with my elderly mother) and holed up in a small hotel in south-west France. There he devoted himself to long walks and prolonged self-analysis, which was recorded in an ever more disjointed fashion in the letters he sent me on yellow foolscap. I don't remember ever replying, partly because the outpouring had no focus, merging past and present, but also because I did not want to get involved in this doomed search for my own father's identity. To an extent he involved me willy-nilly, however, because he ran out of francs and instructed the hotel-keeper to call and ask me to send a cheque to tide him over. I saw him one last time on his way back through Paris when I was still angry with him for having abruptly ditched
my mother, whom I had to shepherd back to London. We met briefly in a café on the rue de Birague, just outside the studio, and at one point while we were arguing I leant over, squeezed his upper arm hard and saw him wince with pain. He promised to reimburse me, which I knew he would. It wasn't about the money. It had never been about the money. It was the fact that we were father and son and that since I was a small boy there had been no love or understanding between us, only growing anger, recrimination and scorn. Somehow I suppose I thought there would come a time when we would sort that out, just as he had been trying to sort his life out. Now, I'm still trying to take in all the implications of his death, which multiply day by day and crowd out any other preoccupation. But what is already clear is that all the unresolved misunderstandings and conflicts between us will remain unresolved, and for that from this point on I alone will bear all the blame and all the guilt.

I go back to Stocking Pelham for my father's funeral. All the relatives are there. It's a fine day and after the church ceremony, where the new vicar is clearly uncertain how to pronounce the name ‘Peppiatt' and settles for ‘Pippit', giving the proceedings an extra ring of finality, everyone wanders down leafy lanes back to the house and a buffet lunch is served outside. One of the strange things about a death is the way the living group together as if to banish it in a moment's jollity, eating and drinking in the sun. He's there, wherever that is, but we're all still here.

‘Will you come to mine?' an ageing but sprightly uncle asks me, waving a glass of wine, as I leave.

‘Of course I will,' I reassure him jovially.

When I get back to London, I feel rootless. I belong less and less in England, but at the same time I am still an expatriate in France. My life has been very full after the first few scant years in Paris. But now it seems to be emptying out. I'm not in a relationship, I don't have a book to write and now my father has gone, leaving only problems behind. Perhaps it's cyclical, the thick and the thin . . .

Oddly I've had that sensation of thinness, insubstantiality, about lots of things over the past few weeks. I was in a little restaurant the other day in Paris – by myself, between seeing shows at galleries on the Left Bank – and suddenly everybody looked strangely transparent, as if they might not really be there. And I myself felt very insubstantial, and I kept looking round to see if anybody else had noticed that something had gone wrong, that things weren't as they should be. It was apparent everywhere. Even the walls weren't quite what they seemed, they had a kind of liquid quality and seemed to shift in and out of focus very slightly. And everything that people were saying didn't quite add up, and I began to wonder whether they had seen that I wasn't quite real and I felt increasingly embarrassed and began to sweat heavily but then I realized it wasn't embarrassment but fear, a piercing, intense but completely absurd fear because I could never explain what it is, just a terrible anxiety that seems to corrode everything, sap its substance and drain it of any sense.

I've had several experiences like this, and to try to control the panic that envelops me each time I admonish myself: it's alright, I'm just having one of my ‘turns', I say, as though it's just a little blip and it won't last. But the turns have been getting worse, more powerful, and I've begun to question who this ‘I' telling ‘myself' actually is or are, because I'm no longer sure that either really exists. They've become like that white wall in the restaurant, a shadowy, shifting identity, as malleable as the colour white fanning out into an infinity of shades. I don't feel particularly at home in London, but I wonder whether I shouldn't stay, find a little boarding house and hole up there until I can sort some of these problems out, find a little clarity. But of course that would be like my father, my newly dead father. It would be like becoming him in order to escape him, and in any case I know full well I cannot escape him. And in any case that would be mad. Mad.

So I take the return flight to Paris, unsettled, knowing that the flat will be empty, that autumn will lead to winter and that I
have no particular prospects. When I get home, I see there are a couple of pale-blue telegrams pushed under the door and some messages on the phone. They're all from
Connaissance
, asking me to call. That's encouraging, I think. Perhaps they've got another story for me, who knows, it might even mean sending me somewhere where it's still warm.

I call next morning and have to wait a moment before being put through.

Philip Jodidio's voice is very cold.

‘I've had Bill Rubin on the phone ranting and raving about your article that he's just seen in the new issue. He says they called an emergency meeting of the whole MoMA board last night to decide what to do about you. He's got MoMA's president Blanchette Rockefeller right behind him and they're taking two firms of lawyers, one in New York and one in Paris, to see what they can find out about your past and whatever else they can dig up so as to build a case against you. He thinks you've criticized the show he's spent years putting together because you're in the pay of African art dealers. Anyway, he feels confident that if they can't get you on anything else they can sue for plagiarism because you quoted extensively from the catalogue.'

I sit by the phone completely stunned. This can't be happening. I must have misunderstood. Perhaps I'm having another turn.

‘What do we do?' I say weakly after a while.

‘Well, there's not much we can do. Rubin's insisting on a lengthy right of reply, with a ton of photos. We're looking into that. But we're not going to back you up, if that's what you mean. You've caused enough trouble as it is.'

‘Well, what should I do?'

‘You'd better get yourself a lawyer.'

I've been going back and forth and round and round every angle and detail of this whole thing. It's obsessive, I can't think about anything else. I had no idea that my review would cause more than a tiny ripple, since most reviews simply disappear into the
ether and are never heard of again. The show's bound to attract hundreds of reviews, including the
New York Times
, which is what really counts in New York rather than some little art magazine in French in far-off Paris. How can it be that my mildly phrased critique has become so pivotal? I suppose it must have touched a raw nerve, a fatal flaw even, and it's the first comment to be published. But who's ever going to see it, and why is Rubin so incensed? He'll get plenty of plaudits in the press. Why has he decided to go for me? And what will the lawyers find out? That my girlfriend had an abortion, that Francis turned down my book? Or that I've been late with my tax return and pay my cleaner in cash? What will they use against me? That I never made it up in time with my father?

Somehow, I suppose, I had all this coming to me. It was bad enough agreeing to an abortion, it was a sickening thing to do, but to have upbraided my father shortly before his death is even more unpardonable. That guilt will always stay with me, and the punishment has probably only just begun, in this completely unexpected guise. That's how real punishments work, subtly, silently, in ways you can never foresee. My father is punishing me through Rubin. They're even similar in some ways, righteously loud and overbearing, and they share the same capacity for rage. I can just see Rubin pacing up and down, like an Old Testament prophet, ranting and raving and cursing me. And I deserve it. I've wronged him, I come to see slowly, as I wronged my father. And he's dead, he can't kick back. But Rubin can, he'll kick me for all he's worth and I've had it coming to me.

I've heard again from
Connaissance
that MoMA has decided to take a series of full-page ads out, especially in the
Herald Tribune
, to denounce me as having attacked the show because I was paid to do a hatchet job by African art dealers. I'm terrified. I don't know what it means, I don't know any African art dealers, but if I'm accused what can I say, how can I prove it? How can I prove I don't know people? How can I prove anything? There's no one I can ask. I don't know any lawyers either, I've
never needed a lawyer and couldn't afford one now that I do. It's funny they should have chosen the
Trib
because I used to write art reviews for them and it's the only newspaper I subscribe to. I've been scanning it nervously for the past few days to see if the ad denouncing me has come out, but I can't bring myself to do it any more and when the
Trib
arrives I just put it quickly, unopened, into the rubbish, hoping that what I don't see won't harm me.

I've wanted for years to take off a couple of kilos but it's starting to go a bit too far. My weight is about the same now as when I left school and it's still going down, rapidly, as if I can't stop it. I'm trying to force myself to eat but I can't get beyond a couple of mouthfuls before feeling nauseous. Even wine tastes bad. It's also become increasingly difficult to sleep, and I think being so tense and lying awake at night is taking the weight off too. And not eating or drinking makes it even more impossible to sleep, so it's a sort of vicious circle. I suppose I had it coming to me, I can't think how else to explain anything. Whatever made up my life before is crumbling and there's nothing to hold on to. It feels like I'm falling. Falling, falling, falling.

There's no end in sight, just crumbling and falling. Of course it's punishment, punishment for having had it too easy, having had too good a time, the carefree bachelor, always free, always available, always after the girls, the laughing, curly-headed boy. Well, he's not laughing now, he's going somewhere else, he doesn't know where, into the dark, falling.

I've stopped going out for anything that's not absolutely essential. I'm terrified when I'm in here, terrified of the phone ringing to tell me things have got worse, what the lawyers have dug up and what further revenge Rubin in his righteous rage is going to take. But I'm far more terrified outside. Even on the bright winter afternoons which I used to love, when the buildings and trees cast long, low shadows, like a mysterious, parallel universe on the ground, I don't want to go out. The streets frighten me, and I have to make an almost superhuman
effort to cross them. Crossing the street feels like deliberately stepping out in front of a bus, inviting another disaster, because disaster dogs everything I do. So if I have to cross, which I used to do just jaywalking and dodging the cars like a real Parisian, now I go and wait at the lights until they're red and even then I'm afraid.

I used to be frightened of death, but this is like death and I'm still afraid of it. Sometimes I think of George, of the handfuls of pills, but I don't think I could do it, I'm too frightened of the idea of killing myself to actually kill myself, but the fact that I entertain these thoughts makes me more terrified still. I try to put them out of my mind, both the thoughts and the pills, but at the same time I wonder whether I haven't lost my mind, gone out of my mind, leaving only this welter of weakness and terror behind. Perhaps I won't have the guts to kill myself, but if I keep going on in this downward spiral, in this agony of guilt and tension and anxiety, I might of course die. It's been weeks now that I haven't eaten properly and I can see my face pale and drawn in the mirror and my ribs have started sticking out. I have to do something, I don't know what to do. I've never seen a lawyer and I've never seen a psychiatrist, I've always made fun of seeing shrinks, it's what weak people and nutters do, well I'm weak now and a nutter, and I have to talk to someone soon, I can't keep going down any more.