The Bat Tattoo (10 page)

Alison nodded approvingly in Roswell’s direction. She’s a tall stout woman with green butterfly spectacles and red hair that she wears short. She’s fifty or so and looks like the cynical friend who’s seen everything but she’s not cynical at all. ‘New friend?’ she said.

‘Acquaintance,’ I said. ‘I met him at the V & A.’

‘I picked up my first husband at the V & A,’ said Linda. She’s a small woman closer to sixty than fifty, neat figure, close-cropped grey hair, does yoga, mostly wears black.

‘But you put him down again,’ said Alison.

‘Nothing’s for ever,’ said Linda. ‘It was OK for three years.’

Carmen was now into the
seguidilla
. I visualised her tied up and sitting in a chair in the Apple Market while Don José passed the hat. I too was tied up, by a very large woman who was almost as wide as my table and effectively blocked it from other punters. I’d seen her several times before this and she’d never bought anything. She’s from Leeds and she collects Scottish terriers — figures, brooches, whatever. ‘I’ve got two real ones,’ she said, ‘Glen and Fiddich. They’re adorable. Do you have a dog?’

‘I’ve got a Butler & Wilson French-poodle brooch here but no Scotties.’

‘I mean a live dog, the kind you take for walks.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘My two are so clever — when they see me getting ready to go out they run and get their leads and wait for me by the door. They love to get into bed with me when I watch television. They especially like those old Lassie movies. Children might disappoint but dogs never.’

‘Do you have any children?’ I was trying to see around her for prospective customers but I wasn’t having much luck.

‘No,’ she said, and at this point Roswell appeared with the coffee and tea and gently and apologetically overlapped into the space she was occupying so that she was eased out of it. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said as she removed herself, ‘I’m always in the market for Scotties!’

As we drank our coffee and tea there appeared one of my regulars, a pleasant and enthusiastic woman from New York who likes to spend money on costume jewellery. Florence, her name is, but I always think of her as Floradora because of her flamboyance. She’s a small woman but dresses as if she were a large one, favouring large prints in bold colours and jewellery that can be seen clearly from a distance. Today her frock featured red cherries as big as oranges on a black background. She wore her grey hair in a beehive, with red-framed spectacles, red plastic hoops in her ears, and a necklace of shiny plastic cherries and green leaves. Florence is secure with her style; she knows what she likes, has fun looking for it, and enjoys being herself. I like her for that. Plus she puts her money where her taste is.

‘What’ve you got for me?’ she said. ‘I haven’t bought anything yet this trip, I’ve been saving myself for you.’

I took out the Schiaparelli necklace and earrings I’d been keeping under wraps with her in mind. Purply and iridescent, shimmery and splendid, they would have looked good on a six-foot showgirl. ‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Mmmm!’ said Florence. ‘You know me too well. I surrender. Will I leave here with enough money to get back to the hotel?’

‘You’re a regular,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give you a friend’s price which is a little better than I’d give a dealer.’

‘I appreciate that. How much?’

‘Three hundred.’

She blew out a little breath and nodded. ‘Worth every penny too; there’s not enough sparkle in the world.’ She counted out six fifties, I wrapped the necklace and earrings in tissue paper, put them in a small Harrods bag, and we shook hands. ‘Now I’ll need a new dress,’ she said. ‘A woman’s shopping is never done.’

‘Life is hard. Be brave. Come back soon.’ We were all smiling after Florence left. The money made this a good day but my main satisfaction came from having judged correctly that she’d go for the Schiaparelli. The buskers in the Apple Market had finished with
Carmen
some time ago and were waltzing with Johann Strauss,
Tales from the Vienna Woods
. All the aisles between tables were full of people by now, eyes hard with acquisitiveness, their mouths busy with buns and coffee, the money in their wallets and purses eager to jump into ours. The lilt of the music lifted the sounds and smells of the market, the voices and the footsteps and the pigeons plodding on the cobbles, and I hummed along with it.

Roswell had picked up a little Goebel china figure from my table, probably from the fifties, a model of a nutcracker, one of those toothy chaps with tremendous jaws worked by a lever in the back. He was four inches high with a bushy white beard, wearing the uniform of Frederick the Great’s tall troopers: blue shako with a red plume, short red frogged jacket, white trousers with a blue stripe, shiny black boots.
He was holding his sword upright against his shoulder and grinning heroically with his many teeth. He wasn’t a working model, couldn’t crack nuts, and if enlarged to full human scale would be very short and stubby; but he seemed cheerfully capable of crunching any difficulty whatever. Not a failer.

Roswell was grinning back at the little china man. ‘This one talks to me,’ he said. It was priced at twenty and he reached for his wallet.

‘Put away your money,’ I said. ‘You caught a thief, saved a ring, and brought me luck. Have it as a little thank-you from me.’

‘He’s a short guy but that’s a big thank-you,’ said Roswell. ‘Thank
you
.’ He seemed about to say more, blushed, decided not to, looked at his watch, said, ‘I haven’t done any work yet today. See you.’ And left. Whistling ‘Is That All There Is?’.

Alison and Linda were looking at me in a smirking sort of way.

‘What?’ I said.

‘A famous madam,’ said Linda, ‘once said that when you start coming with the customers it’s time to leave the business.’

‘I’m not all that professional,’ I said, ‘and I’m feeling expansive. This is one of the good days.’

Strongly intriguing, is it not, the variety of ways in which we humans replicate ourselves? I do not speak of the process of reproduction here, no. I have in mind dolls, models, puppets, toys soft and hard, with clockwork and without. I have a little tin clockwork porter who pushes a tin trolley piled high with tin luggage. I have a smiling plastic gymnast who does marvellous things on the bar and never tires as long as his clockwork is rewound. I have a tin ice vendor who pedals his icebox tricycle but has no tin customers. These little toy people do the same as their human counterparts but they do not relieve the humans of their duties.

I think now of crash-dummies, little ones first. The wooden two who make love to the sound of a crash, their black-and-yellow discs emphasise the motion of their bodies. So erotic is the sight of them as with blank blind faces they couple without fatigue and inspire Victoria and me to new heights of passion. Why should the action of these dummies have that effect? I think it is because always more sexual excitation is needed, and to see the toy copulating while we do the same is exciting. And there move with us the black-and-yellow discs we have painted on ourselves. Other
elements come into it; there was a film called
Crash
in which the Eros/Thanatos theme was explored with many crashes and sexual acts. It goes without saying that the meeting of hard metal and soft flesh is provocative, and to be naked in a car is already an acceptance of whatever may follow. But this is not what is now uppermost in my mind.

Car crashes arise from drunkenness and careless driving, excessive speed and sleeping at the wheel. These are sins for which many die each year. In the hope of avoiding death we strap dummies into cars and make them die for us. From these harmless deaths we gather data so that we may crash without dying.

Sometimes in the small hours of the night Victoria and I paint our bodies with black-and-yellow discs and our nakedness we cover with black silk dressing-gowns. Then I ring for my chauffeur Jean-Louis and he knows that I want the black Rolls-Royce with the black windows. In the car, quick, quick, we are again naked. Under us the leather upholstery is cool in summer, warm in winter. The Rolls-Royce hums smoothly through the quiet streets, then on to the Périphérique where it acquires speed. On either side rush past the darkness and the lights of Paris and as we fasten ourselves to each other I feel the black-and-yellow discs moving with us and I imagine the impact, the noise and the pain of a high-speed crash. Strange, is it not, what games the mind will play? The crash that impends always, the sudden violent death are built into this road and this motorcar that wants always to go faster. The death in the road and in the machine, the velocity of the car and the feel and smell of the upholstery excite us, cradle us as we give ourselves to each other and the night. We make love, then sleep and love again.

We sleep when Jean-Louis returns us to the Avenue Montaigne before dawn. He inserts a CD in the player and wakes us with Jan Garbarek’s
Madar
. Another day begins; another night awaits us.

I am not an artist. In my house are works of art: Sèvres, Meissen, and Minton porcelain; glass by Gallé and Lalique; a Sevigny armoire; Hofmann chairs and tables and other pieces from the Wiener Werkstätte; Kelim rugs; a T’ang dynasty horse. On the walls are paintings by Daumier, Redon, Guardi, Whistler, and Waterhouse; drawings by Tiepolo, Claude, Friedrich, and Rethel. I can buy art and look at it and be moved by it but to produce it I have not the capability. I look at Daumier’s little painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and I try to feel how he felt when he painted it. I try to think his thoughts; I understand his use of light and shade and colour, the play of weights and volumes, the density of the tinted air in which Don Quixote on Rosinante and Sancho on Dapple are at the same time solid and ghostly, dream and reality. But if I were given a blank panel I could not see what he saw in it; my hand would not know what his hand knew when it held the brush. There is in my life nothing as good as what he did.

There will never again be a Daumier or a Claude; the time for that kind of seeing, that kind of thinking, is past. Art now is too often the childish showing-off of talentless poseurs supported by collectors at the cutting edge of idiocy. We are all of us strapped in a car that speeds towards a blank wall while crash-dummies race ahead of us to die for our sins.

What are the thoughts of Roswell Clark as I write this? In addition to the income from Crash Test he has now
had from me seventy thousand pounds with which to buy unencumbered minutes, hours, days, and weeks. I have given him time in which to be open to what will come to him. What
will
come to him?

OK. Deep breath. My wife, Jennifer. She taught flute at St Paul’s School and she was a good-enough flautist to play with the London Sinfonietta. She was a handsome woman, tall and graceful, dark and brooding. She and I had a fair number of rows but we experienced the world together; if it looked like rain we both noticed it and said something about it; we read things out to each other from
The Times
and the
Guardian
, went to concerts and watched videos together. Now the world goes on without her; she’s not here to see the nights and days, the rain, the changing of the seasons. At odd moments I want to tell her something or show her something, then it hits me again: she’s gone.

It happened on a rainy Saturday night in November. We’d been to dinner with friends in Highgate. It was an OK evening; the
bonne femme
was good; the beef olives were good; the wine was good; the conversation was lively. We’d got around to talking about how busy everyone was, how most of us had more things to do than there was time for. ‘Not Roswell,’ said Jennifer. ‘He has more time than things to do, but he keeps busy thinking about the things that nobody else has time for.’

‘Einstein had the same problem,’ I said.

‘So when are you going to come up with a universal theory?’ said Mark Simpson, our.host.

‘I’m working on a new relativity theory,’ I said. ‘This one is about wives and husbands.’

‘That was more than Einstein could handle,’ said Mark’s wife Nicola, and then Toby Gresham got us into the subject of the expanding universe while Jennifer gave me a look that said, ‘What?’

My answering look said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s
your
problem,’ was her wordless reply. ‘Expansion can be a bad idea,’ said Jessica Gold. ‘Look what happened when Biba moved into Derry & Toms,’ and the conversation went on in various directions along with the cognac and the grappa.

‘Don’t forget that you’re driving,’ said Jennifer as my glass was refilled.

‘How could I, with you to remind me?’

‘More coffee?’ said Nicola.

It was pouring when we left; the streets were very black and shiny; the headlights of oncoming cars lit up curtains of rain, the windscreen-wipers flopped back and forth like an endless argument and in our little room on wheels the atmosphere was getting thicker. I said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s
your
problem,’ said Jennifer. ‘Shouldn’t you have taken a right back there?’

‘Probably,’ I said. We didn’t visit the Simpsons that often, and on the return trip the one-way system in Camden Town sometimes defeated me. Things got blacker and more spaced out with dim lights here and there and I realised
that we were in the usual wrong place somewhere around King’s Cross.

‘How much did you have to drink?’ said Jennifer.

‘Not enough,’ I snarled as I swung the car around into an intersection that seemed very dark and undefined.

‘Look out!’ said Jennifer as we were hit on the passenger side. Her last words.

I haven’t driven since.

‘Stop it, Sarah,’ I said to myself. Because I could feel myself juicing up to make this man do better. He was failing in some way, he was putting out failure pheromones and they were getting me excited. Not for sex but for the hardcore depravity of trying to build towers out of wet dishcloths. He was very evasive in conversation; what was he hiding? For that matter, what was
I
hiding by turning my critical faculties on him rather than on myself?