The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (12 page)

As we were approaching the village of Wolfeton Monica woke up. She was confused and asked me where she was and what was happening. I tried to give her soothing answers but she was obviously troubled. Though I wondered whether I should stop the car and offer her more detailed reassurance my instinct was to go on as we were nearly at Maeve’s.

We were driving along a comparatively narrow stretch of road. Ahead I could see the lights of a lorry approaching. Suddenly Monica grasped the wheel and steered my car into the path of the oncoming vehicle. It was a strong cold grip. The lorry hooted. I wrenched control of the steering wheel and pushed the car back to the other side of the road. The lorry grazed the bumper; Monica screamed and I drove on. I was not going to stop until I reached Maeve’s.

I glanced at Monica in the car mirror. She was in some kind of fit. Tears were starting from her eyes and the mouth was being held down in that terrible rictus.

It was instinct or perhaps Providence which took me to Maeve’s cottage. My brakes screeched as I stopped beside the gate. I saw Maeve running out. Monica was sobbing uncontrollably beside me. When she noticed Maeve she scrambled out of the car and rushed into her arms. I let them go into the cottage together.

For about ten minutes I sat in the car recovering from the delayed shock of the incident with the lorry. My mind was clear but my body was incapable of movement. I can remember debating with myself quite rationally whether my paralysis was mental or physical, and whether such a Cartesian distinction between mind and body was valid in the circumstances. I wanted to move but knew I could not: all my impulses were stillborn.

Slowly, will and movement returned, beginning with the extremities. At last I was able to get out of the car and walk to the cottage. When I came through the door I saw Maeve facing me at the end of the room. Her big, slightly comic face had assumed a serious expression. I knew what it meant: indignation and the secret pleasure that accompanies feelings of moral superiority.

‘What have you been doing to her?’ she asked.

‘Where is she?’

‘Never mind that. She’s upstairs on my bed resting. She doesn’t want to see you ever again, and quite frankly I don’t blame her. First of all she comes down to see you to talk about the play and you try to have her arrested; then, while she’s asleep on the way down you start groping her. She wakes up and tries to hold you off, and in the struggle you bloody nearly drive into a lorry and kill her. And quite frankly, I don’t want to listen to any explanations or excuses, because I’ve had it up to here with you. Just get out.’

I stood my ground and told her what had really happened while she listened with an impenetrable face.

‘D’you expect me to believe that bullshit?’ she asked when I had finished.

‘Why would I have brought her down to you in the first place?’ I asked. After a pause I said. ‘She’s got to you, hasn’t she?’ This last question seemed to shake her.

‘What do you mean?’

I wasn’t sure what I meant, or even who I meant by ‘she’; I had spoken without thinking. Then I said: ‘You must admit there’s something about Monica that’s not quite right.’ Maeve did not reply, but I knew she had seen a little of what I had seen. The silence that followed was broken by a creak and then another. Maeve and I started violently.

The creaks came from the staircase which opened into the main living room through a door. Monica was coming down from the bedroom. We heard her fumbling with the latch; then she entered.

She was wearing nothing except one of Maeve’s dressing gowns which was hanging open. Her eyes were wandering and unfocussed. The corners of her mouth twitched as if they were being pinched by unseen fingers. When she saw me she let out a hiss. Her eyes became fixed on mine with that cold predatory stare that you sometimes see in cats. I thought Maeve would do something but she made no move. Desperate, I let my mind empty itself of all thought in the hope that inspiration would fill the vacuum.

The next moment—perhaps the most extraordinary to me of the whole affair—I stepped forward and hit her hard across the cheek, at the same time shouting her name. The light of humane recognition entered her eyes and I held her close to me calling to her again and again. Her body entered a convulsive phase but I still held on to her and together we were propelled about the room in a strange involuntary dance.

The convulsions were replaced by trembling, then she became still. I laid her down in a chair, thinking the worst was over, but Eleanor Marchant had one more trick to play. With a sudden movement Monica launched herself at me. I cannot remember what happened but Maeve told me afterwards that Monica had butted me in the stomach; I had been thrown back and knocked myself out on the coal scuttle.

I can recall that period of unconsciousness as a kind of dream. Yet it was unlike any other dream I have had. The events in it were coherent, simple and stripped of surrounding detail; my mental faculties were sharply rational.

I found myself in a grey mist. I imagined myself to be standing, but I could feel no solid ground beneath my feet and I seemed to be suspended in vacancy. The sensation—or rather the absence of it—would have been disquieting if I didn’t have the feeling that I was there for a purpose.

A black speck appeared in the mist and seemed to get larger or come closer: in the absence of any surroundings it was impossible to tell which. The speck formed itself into the silhouette of a tall woman in a long dress. I recognised the shape as the one I had seen long ago in the ruins of Grove House. Though the shape became more sharply defined it remained only a shape; no details or features revealed themselves. It was as though I was looking into a black hole in the shape of Miss Eleanor Marchant.

What happened next, although it remains transcendently vivid to me, is almost impossible to describe. I can only say that my mind and that of Miss Marchant came together and fought. Perhaps the word ‘soul’ would be better than ‘mind’ because this was in no sense a contest of intellects. It was a battle for possession and though that possession involved ideas, it was more fundamental and psychic than that. A force that turned the edges of my thought soft was bearing down on me. The sensation was like being just on the conscious side of sleep when one is trying to stay awake, but in this case the sleep was not a pleasant one but full of nightmares. I felt I was being invaded by a mind trapped within its own space, which had no means of survival except by trapping and absorbing others. One lucid idea came to me in this confusion: that the absorption of another mind would offer it no liberty, only a bloated continuation of its former existence. It would be a fatter rat in the same small cage.

Though my thinking was clear, the space in which it had its being was getting smaller. I was losing the battle because, though I could defend, I had no means and somehow no wish to attack. I had a shield but no sword and so I was constantly on the retreat. Two things saved me.

The first was an extension of the thought I had about Miss Marchant’s attempt to possess me, and that was that my resistance was as much for her benefit as for mine. But more than that, my resistance was an attempt to preserve something that was natural, correct, just—any one of those three adjectives would be inadequate on its own—and that her efforts at conquest were the opposite. I would stress that this did not seem to me like a moral conflict in the sense that we normally understand it, a fight against corruption or cruelty. It was the opposition of what conformed with universal harmony—simply another way of saying ‘the way things are’—with what rebelled against it. The force that was trying to possess was doing so in order to remain separate, and that aim was not so much ‘evil’ as self-defeating.

The second element which turned the tide in my favour was a simple phrase: ‘Go in Peace.’ Insofar as one can hear without ears, I heard this; it did not come from inside me. I think I recognised the voice of Maeve speaking it first, but the phrase was taken up by a thousand other voices unknown to me. It was not long before I knew that phrase to be my salvation and I was speaking it as well. The phrase swelled into a chorus, each expression of it woven into a clear yet complex pattern, like a Bach fugue. I felt the pressure being lifted from my mind and the dark silhouette begin to withdraw. I became a very small part of what was now happening, barely more than a spectator, as the phrase: ‘Go in Peace’ reverberated all around me. Its meaning seemed to become richer and more complex as it was taken up by more voices higher and deeper. Each of the three words contained a universe.

The last thing I remember of this visionary part of my experience was witnessing some subtle transformation taking place in what had previously been the black silhouette of Miss Marchant. Streaks of silver were appearing in it and turning it from a flat dark surface into a three-dimensional figure in grisaille. Light was moulding the head and I began to see those familiar Marchant features, scored still with lines of pain but somehow more real and realistic than before. Then the head turned away and the figure began to move off towards an unknown destination.

I woke up to find both Monica and Maeve bending over me. I said: ‘She’s gone.’ They said: ‘We know.’ After that there seemed to be nothing more to say. I slept on the sofa at the cottage and drove back alone the following morning to London.

**

About a month later Monica and I went down to Broadstairs. We visited my old school, Stone Court, now an old people’s home, and walked around the housing estate which had been built over Grove House and its grounds. It was a Sunday: children were riding around on bicycles and fathers were cleaning cars or mowing front lawns. Then we walked to the North Foreland and threw the tile from Grove House into the sea.

That was not the end, of course, but it was a kind of beginning. As for the danger, it had merely entered a new phase, but for us it did not come again from beyond ourselves.

TIGER IN THE SNOW

It was not perfect, but it was her own. As a site for an art gallery it had the advantage of being just off New Bond Street, comprising two large airy rooms together with a small office. On the other hand it was on the third floor and the rent was ridiculous; but for Sally Cochrane it was to be the start of her great career. For some years she had earned a very good living running galleries for other people: she had done it well; she had built up a superb list of contacts. The glory, however, had belonged to others and, though the owners may have listened to her suggestions, she had never been allowed to choose her own artists.

Sally had decided views on the work she wanted to display. She wanted the newest, the freshest, the most adventurous. She wanted to take risks, a thing her employers talked about but very rarely did. And for her first exhibition at the Sally Cochrane Gallery she wanted one of the Young Wreckers.

The Young Wreckers were so called because
Young Wreckers
was the title of the highly publicised exhibition this group of artists had held jointly just after they had left Bermondsey Art School. They explained the title by saying that they were bent on wrecking the preconceived notions of the current art world. They were wise enough not to specify what these preconceived notions were, just in case some killjoy critic were to tell them that such ideas had long ago been abandoned and nobody took any notice of them anyway. Whatever else they were, the Young Wreckers were shrewd, and their talent for showmanship was formidable.

Their leader Kevin Spooner was well known for his ‘bar-code paintings’, huge enlargements of supermarket bar-codes painted on canvas in vivid colours which sold well to the boardrooms of retail companies. His bust of the late Princess Diana made entirely from his own frozen semen aroused great indignation and much desirable publicity. There was Anna Frend who made the famous Butter Bridge. Her representation of a human penis constructed entirely from smashed light bulbs is a curiously beautiful thing. It is also, of course, a wittily ironic comment on the current fragility of male sexuality. The O’Bogan brothers specialised in video art with banks of screens simultaneously showing slightly different versions of one person performing a mundane task. Their most startling piece at the
Young Wreckers
exhibition was their video installation, ‘Breakfast for the Third World’. A bank of a hundred screens showed a hundred different bottoms all defecating at the same time. These films were run repeatedly to the tune of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. It was the title, of course, that created the furore and it drew outraged condemnation from the prime minister of Bangladesh, then visiting the country. Naturally the work was intended to be a mordantly ironic attack on Western consumerism and waste, but representatives of impoverished countries are not always as sensitive to irony as they should be.

It was generally agreed, by the critics if not by the Young Wreckers, that the most talented of this group was Tina Lukas. She specialised in meticulously detailed installations with a strongly autobiographical slant. For
Young Wreckers
she produced an extraordinary reconstruction of the hotel room in which she had been conceived. The walls, of which she had taken casts, were made from a transparent resin into which photographs of herself and her parents at various ages had been set. The bed bore the distinct impression of two naked bodies facing one another but not touching. The critics described this piece as tender and poignant which perhaps it was, though it has to be said that Tina Lukas’s parents did not like it at all.

She went on to produce a number of smaller installations which were bought by the Tate Modern and other major galleries, and her commissioned memorial to the victims of the Brighton Rail Disaster won almost universal acclaim. She had cast in a translucent amber resin some random objects found in one of the ruined carriages. These she arranged in an airtight glass case through which wound tendrils of smoke lit by gently varying beams of light. The effect, which in cruder hands might have seemed mawkish or merely vulgar, was haunting and pathetic. Even some relatives of the victims approved.

Tina had just been announced as being on the short list of the Turner Prize when she also agreed to open the Sally Cochrane Gallery with a one-woman exhibition. Sally felt that her career was made. It had taken her months of patient negotiation, because Tina, despite her Young Wrecker image, had a deeply reclusive streak.

Only one small cloud hovered on the horizon for Sally: Tina had not thought of anything to exhibit. With three months until the opening, this was serious, for Tina was a slow worker; and only a new piece of hers was going to command the publicity Sally needed. Sally kept in touch with Tina by telephone; she visited her workshop in Whitechapel. She tried to keep up a gentle, tactful pressure, knowing that anything remotely resembling intimidation would send Tina bounding into the undergrowth like a frightened gazelle.

Tina’s creative block was simply explained. She was having an unhappy love affair with a sculptor called Jake Pomorski who made large, unsold, unattractive pieces out of rusty scrap metal. His resentment of Tina’s success took the form of an intensely critical approach to everything she did. He told her and himself that he was critical of her work only because he cared deeply about it and wanted to improve it. The result for Tina however was creative paralysis.

Sally began to hate Jake with a passion. She was intelligent enough to realise that she would damage her cause if she were rude about him in front of Tina, so she treated him with glacial politeness and praised his work very faintly indeed. ‘Interesting’ was the adjective she used; even, when she was feeling particularly vicious, ‘quite interesting’. Jake, who fully returned the hatred, would tease Sally about the approaching date of her gallery’s opening. ‘What are you going to do?’ he would say. ‘Have an exhibition of empty space? That would be quite interesting.’

The situation was becoming intolerable. Then one day Sally visited Tina in Whitechapel and found for once that Jake was absent. He was usually there when Tina had visitors because his fanatical jealousy extended even to women friends. Sally noticed a slight bruising around Tina’s left eye and asked about it. Tina swept a pale lock of hair over it and gave an evasive reply about a fall in the kitchen but Sally knew that Jake had done it. The anger Sally felt was so great that for almost half a minute it stopped her from speaking. Even after that she could not trust herself to approach the subject directly.

On her way to visit Tina Sally had bought an
Evening Standard
. The front page had a report of a woman convicted of stabbing her husband to death. The case had aroused some controversy because though the woman, Jean Miller, had killed her husband while he was asleep on the sofa of their living room she had pleaded not guilty on the grounds of provocation and self-defence, maintaining that he had physically abused her over several years. However, her counsel had not convinced the jury and Jean Miller was found guilty of murder. Sally drew Tina’s attention to the story. It was the nearest she could get to a direct reference to Jake’s behaviour.

Tina showed interest: ‘Look at their house,’ she said. On one of the inside pages there was a photograph of the house in which the killing had taken place, a large modern, detached dwelling on a new estate outside St Albans. It was described in the paper as a ‘dream home’ (‘but the dream became a nightmare’ it inevitably added). The victim, Ken Miller, had been the personnel manager of a large pharmaceutical company.

‘ “Dream Home”,’ said Tina. ‘I love that phrase. Isn’t it extraordinary? Of course a real dream home would only exist when you were asleep. A real dream home would be unreal, wouldn’t it? The rain would fall through. Can I keep your paper? I’d better see this dream home; it might give me some ideas.’

Sally left soon after. She could see that Tina did not need her; her own thoughts were becoming far more interesting companions. But Sally was very pleased with what had happened. She had set Tina’s mind working, and maybe the exhibition would not have to be postponed after all.

For a week Sally did not ring Tina, much as she wanted to. At the end of it she was longing to know what Tina had been doing. Several times she found her hand poised over the telephone. On one of these occasions the phone rang, but it was Jake.

‘What the fuck have you been playing at, Sally? What the . . .’ and so on. Sally was subjected to a monotonously obscene battery of insults. The burden of Jake’s complaint was that Sally had set Tina off on a project of which he personally did not approve and to which he had been denied what he called ‘input’.

‘She’s refusing to take any constructive criticism. That’s bad news. I’m beginning to worry that she’s going down the tubes as an artist, I really am.’ A note of sentimental compassion had come into his voice, self-pity masquerading as pity.

‘Has she chucked you out then?’ asked Sally.

‘What the fuck has it got to do with you?’

‘Everything, it would seem,’ was the smart reply that Sally thought of but did not give. Her father was in the Royal Navy and she had absorbed some of his disciplined decency.

‘I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not what you think,’ said Jake confusingly and rang off.

The next day Tina telephoned to announce that she had one or two ideas and would Sally come round to Whitechapel and discuss them? There was a suppressed excitement in Tina’s voice which implied: ‘Come now!’—so Sally did.

**

Tina’s studio flat in Whitechapel was almost as big as Sally’s gallery. It was situated at the top of a warehouse just off Brick Lane and consisted of a large studio with a sloping roof, most of which was made of glass, and a little warren of smaller rooms off it. Everything was painted white. Sally noticed a new tidiness and discipline about the place.

‘Jake’s gone, then?’ she asked.

‘Oh . . . yeah . . .’ said Tina carelessly, and that was the last time she mentioned him. She went over to a plan chest, opened a drawer and took out a folder. Sally wondered if she was going to be offered a cup of tea—she would have liked one—but Tina was oblivious to such niceties.

‘Now then,’ she said. ‘You remember that house I was talking about? Where Jean Miller murdered her husband Ken? Well, I went to see it. You can’t imagine the trouble I had to get in there, just to photograph the place. They didn’t know who I was. They obviously haven’t heard of the Turner Prize in St Albans. Anyway, luckily I’ve got an uncle who’s quite high up in the police, so I managed to get into the place. I even managed to see the sofa on which Ken Miller was murdered. I took a picture, but they wouldn’t sell the sofa to me. The bloodstains are still on it. Anyway, the house was amazing.’

Tina opened the folder and took out a set of large colour photographs of the interior of the murder house. It looked much as Sally had expected it to look: expense had not been spared on its embellishment but taste had; or rather what Sally and those like her understood as taste. There were ruched curtains of glazed chintz, wallpapers of simulated watered silk, onyx-covered tables, carpets with patterns like an explosion in a paint factory. The furniture, when it was not aping the worst excesses of Louis XVI, was bloated, bulbous and upholstered in violent-hued velvet or leather. And the ornaments! And the pictures!

‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ said Tina who gave the impression that she had seen nothing like it before. Where has she been? thought Sally. Tina took out another set of colour pictures.

‘Now, this is the murder room itself.’

It was the main lounge, lavishly appointed like the rest of the house. There was a bar in one corner. There were brown bloodstains on the white carpet and the sofa which was upholstered in gold brocade. Those stains infected the whole room with desolation and horror. Sally thought she saw the way Tina’s mind was working, but she was mistaken.

‘And look at that picture on the wall. Isn’t it incredible?’ said Tina pointing. Sally peered at the photograph. On the wall behind the fatal sofa was a modern framed print. She couldn’t quite see what it was.

‘Look. I took a close-up of it.’ Tina handed Sally an enlarged photograph of the picture. It was a signed, limited edition print representing a tiger padding through the snow on a bleak mountain top, the legend in barely legible italics was
Tiger in the Snow.
The original painting was obviously the work of a highly accomplished professional artist.

‘It looks like a Roger Banbury,’ said Sally.

‘Yes, that was the name,’ said Tina, surprised. ‘Do you know him?’

‘He’s famous. His originals sell for thousands, and he makes a fortune out of these limited edition prints. Specialises in African wildlife. You must have heard of him.’

‘He’s crap.’

‘Yes . . . well . . . he caters for a market. Not ours. When I was working for the Carlton Galleries they had an exhibition of his work. I met him. Actually, he’s a very nice bloke. Professional, you know. Believes absolutely in what he does.’