The Doctor Is Sick (20 page)

‘How do I know?' said Edwin. ‘How do I know you know?'

‘I know,' nodded Renate. ‘My darling, I know. Last night and the night before were they in this place seen.'

‘Here,' said Edwin, giving her five pounds. ‘Where?'

Renate kissed the note and folded it quarto, octavo. She leaned forward ginnily and whispered: ‘Soho. Soho. For a place a very silly name.'

‘But where in Soho?' asked Edwin. ‘Damn it, Soho's a big district.'

‘I have the name forgotten,' said Renate. ‘Oh, yes. It is for painters. A club.' She raised her arms from her sides, becoming cruciform. ‘Big pictures on the walls. But not very good.
Nicht so schlecht
,' she spat softly. ‘
Nicht so gut
.'

‘Greek Street? Frith Street? Where?'

‘Soho,' said Renate, nodding herself off to buy more gin. ‘You go there, my darling, you poor kid.' Edwin slammed the door and dashed back to finish his toilet. It was a start, anyway, somewhere to start. He admired himself in the mirror, prototypical poet, and wondered whether perhaps he would not be better with a beard. The man of the future, infinitely plastic. Also, perhaps, Bob-detection-proof. But it was the eyes, wasn't it? He rummaged in the living-room and found in a drawer – among bus tickets, hairpins, buttons, odd comb-teeth, bottle-openers, fuse wire, a ripening tomato or two, cornflake gifts, hanks of hair in rows wrenched roughly, dirty pictures, an army pay-book, an old denture, cachous, a scented devotional BVM missal-marker, a few unwrapped Mintoes, P. and O. cocktail tridents, four or five playing cards, dominoes, a die and a shaker – a dusty cheap pair of sun-glasses. These
were Carmen's presumably, or her predecessor's, being of narrow fit. They sat, however, comfortably enough on his own nose and ears. Thus armed, his kinkiness hidden, he was ready for any adventure.

After much searching, sidestreet-wandering, passing of sinister fish-and-chip-shops, Edwin found himself on a fine wide London thoroughfare, the very one he had haunted the foredawn of the day before. He glanced inside several tobacconist's shops and at last saw what he wanted: ill service from a gawky chewing girl who had more time for her waiting friend – an also chewing, plastic-raincoated, puddingy little bitch – than for her customers.

‘Twenty Senior, please,' said Edwin, proffering a note.

‘Haven't you got nothing less?' crossly chewed the girl.

Edwin removed his sun-glasses to show sincere, though kinky, eyes, saying: ‘Sorry.' And he suffered the girl to tell out his change with petulance. ‘You'll have to have nearly all silver,' she said. This was his punishment. Edwin was profuse in his thanks. Out in the street, enjoying a free smoke, he hailed (Icelandic
heill
: health; hence a greeting; hence a call) a taxi. Real money for this, no free ride. But it really would be free, wouldn't it? How does one know, where does one start, what are really
meum
and
tuum
? ‘The Soho Square end of Greek Street,' he told the driver. That seemed a reasonable sort of starting-point. Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho. When Crosse and Blackwell glowed on their left the driver said: ‘This do, guv?' The square was a mess of cars, parked and crawling. Edwin paid him and but meagrely tipped him, then he walked into Greek Street. A club with paintings on the
wall. How did one get into a club if one happened to be oneself not a member? One waited outside perhaps and asked a member to sign one in. Rather like the days when he would wait outside a cinema and ask any entering adult to be the accompanying adult without whom no child under sixteen could be admitted when it was that sort of film.
The Dangers of Ignorance. The Miracle of Birth. The Man Whose Nose Dropped Off
.

Edwin walked a long way without finding a club for painters. There were restaurants offering everything in the world but roast beef and Yorkshire. There were coffee-bars with gimmicks: Heaven above, Hell below, and the W.C. called Purgatory; Necrophiles' Nest; The Vampire, with bloody lighting to encarnadine the coffee. There were pubs in plenty. Growing thirsty at last, Edwin entered one of these, decided he did not like the landlord, and tendered five pounds for his double Scotch. ‘What's this, what's this?' said the landlord, holding the note to the light. ‘They've done you, that's what they've done, a real fake this is.' ‘The swine,' said Edwin, offering good silver. ‘You can't trust anybody, can you?' The landlord went to telephone, so Edwin gulped his whisky and left.

At length it seemed that he had found what he was looking for. THE CHINESE WHITE. About right for Han Su-yin, he thought nastily. A negro with a small beard was just about to enter, so Edwin said politely: ‘Excuse me, sir. There's somebody I'm looking for. It's a matter of buying a picture, probably. If you would be so good as to—'

‘If you want to buy a picture,' said the negro, ‘I've got pictures. Affluent patron of the arts, eh?' He both sneered and smiled – the artist's age-old dichotomy showing
through. ‘You come in,' he said. ‘I've got paintings hanging up inside.' He opened the door, disclosing a shirt-sleeved corpse of a man presiding over a visitors' book. Edwin wrote down his name and was signed in. The negro, whose name seemed to be F. Willoughby, thrust aside a curtain. Edwin took off his dark glasses and saw what he had expected to see: shabby hirsute men and girls in coloured stockings. The room was long, narrow, noisy and smoky. There was a bar at the end, and the walls were covered with canvases. Of Nigel and Sheila there was no sign. Perhaps they would come in later. Plenty of time, after all.

‘I don't suppose I, as a non-member, am allowed to buy drinks,' said Edwin. ‘So perhaps I could give you this money and you could do it for me.' He tried to fold a five-pound note into F. Willoughby's large painter's paw. But F. Willoughby said:

‘Anybody can buy a drink in here once they get in here. I'll have a large Pernod.'

‘And so you shall,' said Edwin, seeing with joy that the barman was busy and that he didn't like the look of him anyway. He squinted a bit, just like the pseudo-Britannia he was going to get. But when Edwin had just about caught his eye, there was a general shushing and a temporary cessation of trade. Edwin looked round from the bar to see that a lank young man with glasses, turtle-neck sweater and hair geometrically straight, was sitting on a stool in the middle of the floor, tuning unhandily a Spanish guitar. After one or two sour and simple chords he began to recite, chordally emphasising his cadences in the supposed manner of the Psalmist:

‘For them that looked for the way out and found it:

This.

There were holes that grew as doors with looking for them,

And for those that walked through with their heads high as kites,

This.

Where were the holes?

In man, in woman, in bottles, in the tattered book picked up from the mud on the rainy day by the railway junction.

But the whole of wholes, the holy of holies, where was, where is

This?'

There was a great deal more, so old-fashioned as to have become up-to-date, and Edwin thirsted, but most listened with respect. ‘That,' explained F. Willoughby in a whisper, ‘is This. Poetry,' he added. ‘But those are mine, those over there.' He pointed, and, seeing him point, someone went shush. Edwin saw a series of small canvases, and each one was of a circle. Some were bigger than others, and the plain painted backgrounds varied in violent poster-colour, but every one of F. Willoughby's pictures was a portrait of a circle. ‘They're only circles,' whispered Edwin. ‘Circles, that's all they are.'

‘Shhhhh.'

‘Only?' said F. Willoughby. ‘You say only? You ever try to draw a circle with your bare hands?'

‘Shhhhhh. Shhhhhhh.'

‘Through the ultimate hole is reached

This:'

What mouselike becomes lionlike when the hole is seen not just as a door in but a door out,

A door out of

This:

Cage. Cage.' (And CAGE went the guitar-chord.)

‘But surely,' whispered Edwin, ‘all painting is done with the bare hands, isn't it?'

‘See here,' said the psalmist. ‘I'm very nearly finished. Do you mind?'

‘Best line of the lot,' said Edwin.

‘Shhhhhhh.' The girls looked prettier, pouting shhhhhh. The psalmist ended, postluded:

‘The holy, the whole, when seen through the hole

Not seen wholly, but only whole holy deliverer

from

This.'

His right chording hand plucked, withdrew from the strings, and poised in a plucking posture in the air. Edwin clapped as loud as any, ordered two large Pernods and whatever the barman wanted, and received lots of change in real money. ‘About this circle business,' he said.

‘There was a big painter in the past,' said the negro, ‘an Italian, and he could do that. Nobody else since. Only me,' he said, and sipped.

‘But does that make it aesthetically more valid?' asked Edwin. ‘The viewer doesn't know whether you've done it freehand or used a compass, does he?'

‘Look as hard as you like,' said F. Willoughby, ‘and you won't find any compass pin-prick in the middle.'

‘But suppose I were to put a pin-prick there as though it had been done by a compass,' said Edwin. ‘Would that make any aesthetic difference?'

‘See here, brother,' said F. Willoughby in a Parisian accent, ‘I just make them. I don't argue about the aesthetics, see? Ten guineas the set.'

‘Done,' said Edwin, handing over fifteen pounds. ‘I want four ten change.'

‘For four ten,' said F. Willoughby, ‘you can have that canvas over there.' It was a not unpleasing pattern – whorls in puce and lemon and jade.

‘Sorry,' said Edwin, ‘In any case, it's your turn to buy a drink.' F. Willoughby fought his way through to the buying of two flat light ales and brought back also Edwin's change. Edwin became aware of a quickening beat of interest in him, speculative bright eyes on this munificent patron who, if he would buy a set of circles for ten guineas, would undoubtedly buy anything. ‘I'm rather fond of Nigel's work,' said Edwin. ‘Is there any of it around?'

‘Nigel?' said F. Willoughby. ‘Which Nigel? Nigel Crump? Nigel Meldrum? Nigel Mackay-Muir? There's a fair number of Nigels.'

‘Nigel with a beard.'

‘Bless you,' said F. Willoughby Dickensianly, ‘they've most of them got beards. And there's none of their stuff round here.' He gazed somewhat gloomily at the mostly deplorable pictures on the walls: old-style Chirico pastiches with broken columns and arthritic horses; a portrait or two of the artist's commonplace friend; lifeless still-lifes; a kind of Klee with a stick man and a chunk of bread moon.

As the evening progressed Edwin bought most of these pictures. He thought it a pity that so many of the artists
who eagerly accepted Bob's fake notes had been so little trained in visual observation, but that, after all, was their business. Edwin began to feel mature and gangsterish. The painters promised to arrange delivery of their works and, after some thought, Edwin gave his address as the hospital and his name as R. Dickie. There was still no sign of Sheila and whichever Nigel it was, but Edwin began to care less as the drink flowed. To give the young painters their due, they were quick to change their five-pound notes into wine, spirits and genuine currency. Ultimately, too, it was not the club that seemed to suffer: a painter who, from his lack of beard, seemed relatively prosperous, came in to cash a cheque, a fairly large one. He walked out head high, his nose splayed in the insolence of success, with a fair number of fake notes. So everything was really all right.

The young man with the straight hair and Colin Wilson turtle-neck took his central stool again and struck a lumpish bass E and a neuralgic treble one, a flat A, a tinny D, a fair G and a sharpish B. Then, to a bigger crowd than before, he began to sing a song very popular at that time with young England: an historic American ballad about the discomfiture of the British at the Boston Tea Party. But F. Willoughby, F. Primum Mobile Willoughby, still moved, like owls, in circles.

‘You've got to admit,' he said, ‘that that's the real test of draughtsmanship. Could Rubens do it? Could the one with one ear do it? Could that big Spanish painter with the astigmatism? No. But I've done it, haven't I? I let you have those too cheap,' he said.

‘You can have another pound,' said Edwin, reaching for five.

‘And so these Boston citizens, still with their feathers on,

Staggered from the hold with the chests upon their

backs.

 Cheer, boys, cheer as the tea hits the harbour:

Davy Jones can drink it and the devil pay the tax.

‘It's appreciation that's important, too,' said F. Willoughby. ‘You need two kinds of patrons really. Those with the money and those with the taste. That might be a good sort of argument for marriage.'

‘Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhh.'

‘But,' said Edwin, ‘if a machine can do it better—'

‘A machine can't do it better.'

‘It's like photography really, isn't it?' said Edwin. ‘What you don't get in a photograph is the human vision. But the human vision is essentially imperfect. That's why a perfect circle—'

‘Shhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhhh.' Edwin pouted his lips in kisswise answer to a tousled shushing girl. A kiss? Was sex returning?

‘Look,' said the singer. ‘I've had about enough of this. It was just the same when I was reciting the poem. It's sheer bad manners. Either he shuts up or I shut up.' His guitar twanged agreement.

‘I'm sorry,' said Edwin, ready with a five-pound note. The singer glared and continued:

‘That was the beginning of the famous Revolucyon – Fight, boys, fight till America is free . . . '