SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (9 page)

'Things were going from bad to worse, eh?'

'I think, looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight,
I
might have pointed out to Dotty that we were obviously lurching from one extreme to another, in terms of staff relations, but she'd have had a bit of a problem answering by then.'

'Oh? Why's that then?'

'Because her mouth was full.'

'Ah. Point of no return now reached, by the sound of it.
’

'Not what you'd call a practical staff assessment moment.'

'Sounds like she was assessing your staff practically enough.
’

'It was all over in a couple of minutes
–
I
mean, it hadn't been planned. Or at least,
I
don't think it had. The secretary handed me a Kleenex tissue, and left, saying she might do a bit more filing on the Monday, if she felt like it; but on the other hand, she might not. And that was the first time I'd looked through the window. On the roof top opposite there's these two blokes in yellow helmets. They gave me the thumbs-up sign and a big cheer.
’

'Weekend workers, one and all,
I
suppose. Sense of solidarity.
’

'Trouble is, they went round blabbing about it, didn't they?

Finally the boss got to hear. Most put out, he was. Said
I
was turning his offices into a brothel. So
I
ended up getting the sack.'

'And now your wife's left you as well.'

'And now my fucking wife's left me as well.'

'Might have been easier to just to go shopping that Saturday,

Col.'

'That's what I'll do next time. Definitely.'

'Supermarkets have been getting more user-friendly.'

Owen had now finished his beer. Another hole had been filled in his mind, and he left.

The Convenience of Women

Henry Allardyce was considering Picasso and his women. It was twelve o'clock and Henry wished that it were already one, because then he could pour himself a glass of wine. But rules were rules. No wine before one. Picasso's imagination and his art fed upon women, that was for sure. His style changed irrevocably every time a new one arrived and an old one departed.

There was Fernande Olivier, whose slow heavy-fleshed carnality he celebrated asleep and awake, drawing her making love or merely existing inside the ruinous state of domesticity to which their life together soon reduced them. Even Picasso's friends were shocked at the shambles they inhabited, and some of those friends lived in sufficiently insalubrious rat-holes themselves. When she started to become ill he told his friends she'd turned into a machine for suffering. To make Picasso jealous, she beckoned others between the sheets. It worked: it did make him jealous. Sadly it also made him hate her.

Little Eva he obviously loved, and she managed to die of the malignant growths inside her before he was provided with a single serious chance to change his mind.

Olga, the Russian ballet virgin, was the first one he had to marry to possess. Even in the portraits he painted of her, many in the style of Ingres, you can see what she was: an effigy of proprietorial self-importance. She actually managed to turn Picasso into a stiff, self-preening bourgeois, though fortunately not for ever.

Dora Maar, that chameleon soul who was greatly gifted herself, let her identity be made over from profligate anguish to the dedicated anguish of being Pablo's lover and she never recovered. Picasso called her the most convenient woman he'd ever met
–
if you wanted her to be a dog, she was a dog, if a bird, a bird, if a cloud, well then a cloud. She could even be an abstract notion or a year gone by or a thunderstorm. She would scream at him in her rages, only to beg forgiveness afterwards and say she would once more be anything, anyone, anywhere he chose to specify. She had stepped straight out of Ovid, ready to change shape into tree or wind, except that she didn't shift forms to escape a god, but to embrace one, to bring him back into her mind and flesh, to have him home again inside her thoughts, between her legs. Later, long after Pablo had gone, she returned to the practice of Catholicism. Her observance by the end of her life was as strict as a nun's. The little god from Spain had been replaced by the big one from the sky.

Marie-Therese
Wal
ter
was no more than a schoolgirl when he met her. She adored him. He didn't so much re-create as create her. For years his painting rejoiced in the curvature of woman-
h
ood and the bright colours of fecundity. It was an incestuous relationship with a new little sister. He left her but she never left him. Even after he'd finished with her he remained the centre of her life till the end of her days. Not long after he died she committed suicide by taking poison. And she was the figure in so many of the etchings from the
Vollard Suite.

Francoise Gilot was the only one who actually walked out on him. That was a first and he made sure there was no repeat performance.

Then the
faithful
Jacqueline
saw him through to the end. Change a woman, change a life. That seemed to be Picasso's motto. The question now was this: had this happened to Henry too? In some ways, i
t undoubtedly had. Now: was it
about to happen again? Break the rules, Henry. There was no one in the gallery. He went through to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of
Nuits St George.
He wanted something decent to help him think.
12
.30 is in any case so close to one o'clock as makes no difference.

His insouciant account of his marriages in fact covered several wounds, as Sylvie had suspected. His first marriage drew to a conclusion with great rapidity when it became evident to Henry that his wife had been conducting an affair for over a year with one of her business partners, a much neater and richer man than Henry had been at the time. Or was now, or ever would be, if it came to that. He could still remember how he had lain awake in his bed and raged, cuckold hours transmuting into eunuch days. He felt as though he had been living in the harem of another man's pleasures. By then, the only thing unveiled for him each night was the spectre of his own humiliation. Laura had simply come and gone, leaving him sore in the process, but Eleanor. Poor Eleanor. As he sipped at his premature glass of wine, he turned the pages of his address book until he found Sylvie's number at the Institute. He had her mobile too but he didn't want to talk to her now, only to leave a message.

'This is the minotaur. Now you know that I won't eat you, will you be coming back again before long? I've been tidying the labyrinth in anticipation.'

As the call was being recorded at the Institute, it was picked up by Hamish Flyte on his RECE monitoring system. He grabbed the phone immediately and dialled
I
47
I
before another call could come in. He then phoned the number provided.

'Riverside Gallery. How may I help you?' Hamish now adopted his wheedling tone.

'Sorry. So sorry. Could I just ask who I'm speaking to?'

'Henry Allardyce.'

'Now I
am
getting confused. Would there be anyone else at the gallery?'

'No, I'm the only one here.'

'Thank you. I think I must definitely have got a wrong number.' He put down the phone and made a note of Henry's name.

When he heard the keys clinking against Sylvie's door later in the afternoon, he quickly opened his own.

'Hello there. What a lovely outfit. Delightful little black skirt, Sylvie. You look as though you're on your way to a date; or coming back from one, perhaps. How's your work in the labyrinth going?'

'In
the labyrinth, Hamish? You mean
on
the labyrinth, presumably.' She was laughing. Silly little man.

'Oh, do
I.
'

She didn't have time to listen to her messages, but gathered together her notes and went straight to the lecture theatre. It was full. That was gratifying. Lionel fixed his eyes on her legs, where they remained for the following fifty minutes.

'I want to start with a quote from the poet W B. Yeats. He is thinking of the goings-on in seances, in which he was very interested. The emanation of spirits. Ectoplasm. Here's what he says: "If photographs that I saw handed round in Paris thirty years ago can be repeated and mental images photographed, the distinction that Berkeley drew between what man creates and what God creates will have broken down." Now just think about this for a moment. Photographs are going to abolish the distinction between what man creates and what God creates. Photographs. The afterlife of images. Conan Doyle had already become convinced of something similar, when he believed those photographs of the Cottingley Fairies. They were fakes, of course, but they fooled the creator of Sherlock

Holmes, that fool-proof detective. Why such an extraordinary dependence on the photograph? Might it be because of our distrust of the human imagination? Might it be because we wish to make memory scientific, and therefore forensically irrefutable? Might it be because we have so come to distrust our own eyes that we wish only to trust the cyclopean eye of our recording lenses? That way we can separate the image from all subjectivity. This would explain a great deal of the modern cult of celebrity, since only those who spend enough time before the cyclopean eye can be said to be truly alive. Until you are sufficiently photographed, you haven't even been born. This might be one explanation why people are prepared to abandon all their dignity for the sake of ten minutes on a television programme. Because they have now been made immortal in an image. We're all Egyptian pharaohs now. The painted food on our walls is an image, so it can never rot. That's the origin of the still life. Anyway, next week we are going to examine photographs from the cave at Lascaux. Let's see if we can work out how every single image appears to have been painted by Picasso.'

She had at some point, without thinking, moved around to the front of the table and sat down on it, crossing her legs. She always did this. But she didn't usually wear the short black skirt and stockings she'd chosen for Henry the previous night. Alison came up to her afterwards with a wary smile
–
she was merely fulfilling the University's peer-review requirements by attending the lecture in the first place.

'Decided to promote your talks amongst the male student body, I see, Sylvie?'

'Why?'

'It's just, with that skirt, if a chap had been in the right place this evening, he could have caught the whites of your thighs above the stocking-tops. I did.'

'Oh shit.'

'Lionel's gone off in search of para-medical attention. Or maybe just a bar. I've been told that alcohol in sufficient quantities produces detumescence.'

Only when she got back to her room did she listen finally to the message from Henry. Minotaur. It struck her what Hamish had said earlier. In the labyrinth. Coming to or from a date. There had been a rumour for some time that Hamish listened in on everyone's calls, keeping personal files on the lot of them. This caused some merriment; some irritation. Nobody was sure if it was legal under the new European legislation. She felt no merriment at all, but considerable irritation. She walked across the corridor to his room and, after the most perfunctory of knocks, walked in.

'Hamish, have you been listening to my calls?'

'I have to monitor all calls to the Institute; it's done on a strictly one-in-X random-selection principle.'

'Well, I'd appreciate it if, in future, one-in-X is someone else and not me. Because I don't like it.'

'Goodness. You do seem to be making a habit of taking the bull by the horns at the moment.'

'Not sure about that, Hamish. But I've always been very good at taking the Jock by the jockstrap. And I once saw a farm demonstration: how to turn a bull into a bullock. So watch it.'