There but for The (17 page)

He listens. They are talking about Miles, maybe.

No, he’s great, I mean, he’s your stereotypical gay man, Caroline is saying. Your professional working gay man, I mean.

He didn’t comment on my clothes at all. They’re supposed to comment on your clothes, Hannah is saying. And he’s not as neat and clean as they usually are. They’re usually more pressed or ironed or something.

Loves his mummy, Richard says.

His mother’s dead, actually, Hugo says.

That’ll be why he’s not so ironed-looking as he should be, Richard says.

Someone, Hannah, laughs.

How do
you
know about his mother? Caroline says.

He told me, Hugo says. She took her own life when he was a boy. Eleven or twelve.

They’re not talking about Miles.
Took her own life.
It is a kindness in Hugo, to be so drunk yet to choose to put it as if he is holding it in gloved hands.

Sad, Jen says. That’s very sad, isn’t it?

She was some kind of painter, Hugo says.

House? Richard says.

Laughter, somebody, subdued.

He was brought up by an aunt, Hugo says. His father was away or not there, something like that, and he was brought up by an aunt after she, his mother, after she went. She was quite well known, well, she was after she died, I’d never heard of her. Faye or Faith or something.

You mean Faye Palmer? Bernice’s low voice interrupts. His mother was Faye Palmer?

His second name
is
Palmer, Hugo says.

Oh, Terence says. Oh my God. One of Faye Palmer’s sons.

He’d be about the right age, Bernice says. Oh, that’s amazing.

Who’s Faye Palmer? Hannah says loud and incredulous.

Faye Palmer, Bernice says.

The Bayoudes tell the table about Faye. Young. Jewish. Wildly talented. Hugely promising. Original. Seminal. Visual artist. 1950s. Strikingly beautiful when you see photos of her. You must have heard of her, they say, she’s often referenced alongside Plath.

Oh yes, Hugo says, Plath, someone’s wife, wasn’t she, and completely brilliant, and insane as a nest of snakes.

Bernice describes Faye’s most famous work, History Sequence 1 to 9, and how it begins with the faraway woman in the chair and, as you come closer, progress from canvas to canvas, you see that the woman is tied at the wrists and ankles to the chair, and then that she looks like she is crying, and then that what she is crying is blood, and as you come closer still you see that her eyes are a bloody mask.

Then you’re right up against the face, up against the eyes, and you see that the eyelids have been sewn shut, with foul little bloody little black stitches, Bernice says. In number 8 there’s nothing but these stitches in extreme close-up. It’s like an abstract, but it isn’t, it’s painstakingly figurative. And then in the final canvas, she goes beyond the mask, right into the eye, and there’s no eye in there, the socket is empty, there’s a foul-looking insect and it’s eating the lining of the socket.

Oh gross, Hannah says. Oh that’s the grossest thing I ever heard.

It’s true, Terence says. It’s an image from reality. Somewhere there’s a quite famous piece of writing by her, about what it means to have to bear the knowledge of inhumanity, having to bear it communally—about how this thing really happened to a war prisoner, who’d had his eyes removed and then his torturers had sewn beetles into where the eyes had been.

Oh I’m going to puke, Hannah says, I really am.

And the big controversy after her death, Bernice says, was that she replaced the man to whom this really happened with what ostensibly, in her paintings, appears to be a series of self-portraits.

Oh,
ostensibly,
Richard says.

Bernice ignores his mocking. She goes on to tell them that this appropriating of history, the fusion of personal and historic, is the thing critics of Palmer’s work still argue about most. In many ways, she says, a continuing tendency to dwell on the details of her autobiography, particularly on the fact that she committed suicide and the possible reasons why, has blocked the proper aesthetic reception of the work.

Oh,
aesthetic reception,
Richard says.

Shut it, Rich, Hugo says.

Why did she? Caroline says.

History Sequence 1 to 9, they’re called, Terence says. You must know them. You will, you’ll have seen them.

And how did she? Caroline says.

I’d know if
I’d
seen one. They sound really disgusting, Hannah says.

You’d absolutely know if you saw one in real life, Bernice says. You can’t not. They’re unforgettable. They’re shocking to the core. But also, they’re really shockingly beautiful.

No way, Hannah says.

They are, Bernice says. They just are.

You wouldn’t take your child to see one of those pictures, though, would you? Jen says.

Our child sees worse things every day on TV, Terence says. She just needs to type a couple of words into a computer to see things every bit as bad, and, worse, to see them as if she’s not really seeing them. Seeing a picture like one of Palmer’s is very different from seeing something atrocious on a screen. There
is
no screen. That’s the point. There’s nothing between you and it.

And to leave a child, Caroline says. What a choice. It’s unthinkable.

Unthinkable just to leave your own self. Think how robust your own heart feels, and your arms, and your legs feel, someone (it must be Eric) says.

Very selfish, Hugo says.

Most difficult thing in the world, Caroline says.

I’m amazed you’ve heard of her. I’d never heard of her, Hugo says.

But you’ve seen her, Bernice says. You will have. You’ve seen her without seeing her. She’s hugely influential, she was hugely important in the ways artists, especially women, came to treat history and to examine how history had treated them. And you can see so clearly now too with hindsight, how they parallel Bacon, practically initiate the post-war self-infliction artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and even, in their colour planes, anticipate Hockney.

That’s not possible, Bacon and Hockney together, Hugo snorts.

Trust me. They do. They do both, Bernice says.

Faye Palmer’s son, Terence says.

Oh God, Jen says. Jewish. And I served him pork.

Bacon and Hock, Richard says. Ha-ha!

Yes but he
ate
it, Jen, Caroline says. He’s probably one of the ones who don’t mind what they eat.

Mark stands just beyond the door.

In his muscles he is thirteen years old and the hush is about to happen all over again, will happen in a moment’s time when, small, thin, in the still-too-big blazer, he’ll enter the prep-room full of boys at St. Faith’s, and no longer be just the Jewish one, like Quentin Sinigal is the coloured one. Now that the inquest has been in the paper and everybody knows, he’ll also be the one whose mother—like in the old joke about Jamaica, whispered behind his back for months and months to come (in fact there will literally be years of this whispering)—went of her own accord.

He glances back up the stairs. He can see the closed door.

The nice chap, Miles, is safe behind it.)

Say that a man is fully formed by not / just what’s remembered also what’s forgot
Mark sat on the circular bench at the gate of the park. It was a warm October day. What would he remember from his visit to the Observatory today? A seagull had walked across the grass at the edge of the park on the tiny white table in the turret that’s been curtained off to make the Camera Obscura. He’d enjoyed that somehow more than seeing a seagull in real life, he thought now, as he sat and watched another real seagull walk across a strip of grass right in front of him.

Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn’t fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird
Mark sat on the bench on a Thursday in October in 2009. Forty-seven years ago today, to the day, he is standing in the lounge of Aunt Kenna’s house. It is a couple of days since he was moved in. He has drawn the short straw. David got Aunt Hope, his father’s other, nicer, sister, and was moved in to Aunt Hope’s house on the other side of town a couple of days ago too.

Everything is so neat it’s a kind of proof, though he’s not yet sure what of. The sizes of the chairs in the lounge, new to the backs of his legs, are a kind of proof. The foreign fall of the cloth on the table is proof. The dark wood furniture in the room is proof. The wooden curve on the side and the top of that cabinet thing where Aunt Kenna keeps the drinks, and which gives off the smell of acridness and plush when you open it, which you can only do if Aunt Kenna doesn’t know it’s what you’re doing, is proof.

His suitcase is in the spare room.

The note his mother left is in the suitcase.

In a house-move roughly seven years from now, when Mark will drop in to pick up the stuff that’s still at his aunt’s, and which his aunt has packed in bags for him, the note will get mislaid, and will be given away to a junkshop in the ribbing of what Kenna thinks of as an anonymous old suitcase. Because this happens at a time in his life when Mark is angry with his mother for doing what she did, he will decide not to go after it, not to go to the junkshop to try to find it again. By the time he is ready to want it again, the note, Aunt Kenna is dead and there’s no way of finding out even which shop she gave the suitcase to all those years ago.

It says, in the dash of her handwriting, on a sheet of Basildon Bond:

Button up your overcoat.

Take good care of yourself.

You belong to me.

That’s all. Nothing else. It isn’t addressed. His father doesn’t know about it. Nobody knows about it. Mark found it on the desk of the open bureau, detached it from the pad along with the three sheets underneath which bear the imprint of the words and packed it without showing anybody.

Her writing is her.

Even the imprints.

He will never know whether this note was meant for him, or David, or for them both, or for nobody at all, just his mother scrawling down something she might want to think about later.

His aunt has an ancient pug called Polly. The pug’s face looks ruined, melted. It looks like what Mark thinks the word tragedy would look like if it were a physical reality, a thing not just a word.

Right now the pug is sitting lumpy in the doorway, looking out on to the yard where Mark’s aunt is what she calls
dealing with
a fledgling thrush which has fallen out of a nest, can’t fly, and has been there, square, dense, idiot, all afternoon, on the cobbles. There are lots of cats round here so his aunt is putting it out of its misery before a cat does.

But Aunt Kenna—, Mark said.

Aunt Kenna waved him away.

It was the pug found it first; Mark saw it circle the bird, curious, benign. It was so tired, the baby bird, of just sitting there on guard, that its eye kept lidding over.

Will the bird’s parents, which are clicking and squawking above the yard, miss it when it dies?

Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling.

But Mark has seen the pug, on a walk, pick up a stone in its mouth and carry it for a little of the walk before putting it down, and then on the way back home again stop to find the same stone and pick it up to carry it some of the way back.

Forty-seven years later Mark could, if he’d chosen to, have called to mind the face of the pug, the dark of the lounge, the ebony cigarette-holder so often in the mouth of his aunt at this time in her life. But of this particular day, this moment, in this room with the resolute tick of its clock and the noise of birds outside, what did he remember?

Not a single thing.

Say that there is a heaven up above / say we survive the bumpy road to love
Mark sat on the circular bench at the gate of the park. It was his day off. Twenty-seven years ago today, to the day, Mark is on a train coming south. He is thirty-two. His heart is high. In three minutes, according to his watch, the train will pull into Platform 8. Jonathan will be waiting for him at the head of Platform 8. Ten minutes ago, as the train reached the city’s outskirts, Mark shouldered on his stripy cotton jacket, said goodbye to the American nun (!) in mufti sitting opposite him, with whom he’d had a long conversation about many things, including sunlight and Nicaragua, and began walking the length of each carriage all the way to the front. On his way through he carries out a little survey, for fun, of what people are reading on the train. A girl reading Women in Love. A man reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—still (!). A woman reading Death in Venice. A woman reading Heat and Dust. A man reading The White Hotel. A young man, very good-looking, reading a novelization of Chariots of Fire. A girl, looks like a student, reading Slaughterhouse 5. Now he’s past the buffet, now he’s through first class, where nobody is reading anything but the Daily Telegraph (!). Now he’s as near the front of this moving train as he can get, and now he is pushing the window in the door down in the smell of diesel, watching the sun glancing off the deep blue of the moving side of the train as it pulls out of the tunnel into the light before the station, and now his hand is on the handle and pushing the handle down, and now the heavy door is swinging open and the train still moving and he sees him there and he jumps, hits the ground running.

Twenty-seven years later, this journey was lost to Mark. It was just one of so many mundane journeys they made, over time, towards and away from each other. He couldn’t have remembered the details of this particular one, lovely though it was, even if he’d tried.

Time came and took your love away and now / say it’s only a paper moon—and how / the ground beneath us melts away like snow / tell every little star I told you so
Mark sat on the bench by the gate of the park and looked at his watch. But then again, this is what happens when, one Saturday night, he goes for a drink in the pub opposite the Turkish restaurant after a play, with a nice chap he’s just met.