Art and Lies

  ‘Sir, I cannot countenance it,’ said the Doll. ‘I have my reputation to consider.’

  (‘And I? And I?’ thought Ruggiero sadly.)

  ‘It is merely a matter of pressure,’ said the Doll. ‘You have told it so yourself in your own book.’ She took down the English translation of Principia Mathematica.

  ‘Pressure?’ said Newton … ‘pressure’, and then, with the splendid certainty of knowledge, ‘Cabbage Soup.’

  ‘Cabbage Soup?’

  ‘Madam, you will prepare, at once, your largest vat of cabbage soup and feed it to this ill-starred man. In such a way will we manage a great force in the chamber of these buttocks’ (he slapped them). ‘The force will then be equal to, or greater than, the atmospheric pressure that surrounds them.’

  ‘You mean that he will fart it out?’ asked the Doll.

  It was a green Doll, a leafy Doll, a chopped, shredded and boiled Doll, a Doll of tablespoons and condiments, a much spilled upon and insulted Doll, who had not, after some two hours, four cabbages and six pints of sewer-smelling broth, succeeded in raising a single bout of wind.

  *

  ‘Enough!’ cried Ruggiero, green about the gills. ‘Enough.’

  ‘It is enough,’ said the Doll, wearily relinquishing her ladle.

  ‘Sir, you will calculate.’ She handed him his own book.

  ‘Madam, what?’

  ‘I will have you calculate the force required to remove this lewd pin from those innocent buttocks.’

  (‘Would it were a pin,’ thought Ruggiero.)

  There was a long silence. Never was a silence so long. Newton wrote, Let Buttock mass (b)m be … and then he scribbled it out and looked sorrowfully at the Doll.

  ‘Think force,’ she said. ‘Think pressure, she said.

  ‘Think force,’ said Newton. ‘Think pressure.’ Then he wrote

  where r = radius, l = length lost …

  ‘Length lost?’ said the Doll.

  ‘That is, length inserted, Madam,’ said Newton. ‘And P = atmospheric pressure.’

  ‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle suddenly.

  ‘You are her favourite author,’ said the Doll, by way of explanation.

  Newton looked at his equation. ‘I will offer you the solution in plain English,’ he said. ‘If six rabbits eat as much grass as one sheep and one sheep shitteth half a donkey’s worth, it is certain that we will need a fully balled boar to drag out this troublesome pin.’

  The Doll looked at Newton with a new respect. ‘I will obtain one,’ she said, and she ran out of her house, across the stockyard and into the abattoir, faster than a knife across a pig’s throat.

  Jack Cut, the butcher, was not a man to mince words.

  ‘God save you Ma’am,’ quoth he, ‘I will have it out with my right hand.’ Not for nothing was he called The Boar of Cheapside.

  When he and the Doll returned to that good lady’s rooms, Newton, Ruggiero, and Miss Mangle, had each fallen sound asleep, and the only noise left was of their snoring.

  ‘I will go en pointe,’ said Jack Cut, tiptoing his eighteen stone manliness across the Turkey rug.

  ‘Be sensitive. Be sensitive,’ whispered the Doll.

  ‘I will be as sensitive as a swine nose in a truffle forest.’

  ‘And yet soft,’ begged the Doll.

  ‘I will be as soft as a young girl’s placket.’

  ‘And be sure in your aim.’

  ‘I will be as sure as a buck at a hind.’

  He took the porcelain offence in one huge hand, and with a mighty shout to Hercules and the Virgin, popped it forth as a bung out of a bottle. Ruggiero, releasing a sudden and substantial volley of farts, soared up off the bed in an horizontal leap, and lay flat suspended in the air for a full half minute, in front of Newton’s astonished eyes. As for the butcher himself, the force of the backward thrust was so great, that it adventured him through the window and into the gutter below. Only Miss Mangle slept on undisturbed.

  ‘She is a saint,’ said the Doll, removing that lady’s blindfold.

  ‘Very Right. Very True.’ said Miss Mangle in her sleep.

  Ruggiero … Ruggiero … It was a kissing Doll and a stroking Doll, a soothing and ointmenting Doll, who sat beside her beloved through the long watches of the night. And as she sat, and as they lay together in cautious pleasure, the Doll discovered a very curious fact about her lover’s mezzo parts …

  Sappho wrote in the margin, CLUE (Handel, German 1685–1759 Occupation: Composer), ‘Di, cor mio, quanto t’amai’.

  Handel

  THE MAN LAY with his head propped on the book. The back of his skull felt hot, not hot and sticky as his forehead did, but as though his head had been packed with embers. There were ashes in his mouth.

  He opened his eyes and saw the neutral roof of the train. He breathed consciously, hating the flat air, and it seemed to him that every dead thing in his life was crouching over him, taking the air.

  He got up suddenly, too quickly, saw the train in a whirligig out of the bullseyes of his sockets. Round and round the neutral patterned seats, round and round the faux wood tables, the still train spinning.

  Twisted faces lurched at him as he was caught in a kaleidoscope of arms. Round and round, the sick of his stomach, and the rouletting train. He fell.

  He fell at the window with both fists, impossible, against the safety glass. In his dream terror he saw the hammer, or was it the axe, strapped snug in a little red holder against the heave. He put his hand through the shattering plastic, and heard somewhere, a long way off, the dull ugly bell that warned him to go back to the schoolroom, back to the operating theatre, that the oxygen was low, that someone was at the door to see him. The door. He found the door, sealed in its protective, insulating rubber, and with all his strength, he brought the axe to cleave the seam.

  The vacuum dispersed. The doors bounced apart, just enough for him to shove the haft between them, and then he thought that two angels came on either side of his wounded arms, and pulled the doors back, and off their runners.

  He let the axe fall, and stepped off the loose steel plates, on to the concrete harbour. Ahead, the cliffs, the sea, the white beach deserted, and the light.

  He was carrying the book.

  Years ago he had been in a car crash. He had been driving steadily, the smooth road, clear, controlled, then, as he tried to turn the wheel, the car disobeyed. The servile box of leather and steel turned on him, turned over and over on him, the tarmac rearing up off the hard core and coming through the windscreen at his face. He had been listening to Turandot and the compact disc jammed but would not break; La Speranza, La speranza, La speranza, why had he not died? He often thought of it and wondered what the grace was for and why he had never acknowledged it. A second life. For what? Only to do again what he had done before but this time blunted by repetition? When he had crawled out from under the molten car, he had walked purposefully for two miles, before a police car picked him up. He said, ‘There’s nothing the matter Officer. I am a doctor.’ He had shown them the tattered ribbons of his driving licence.

  Later, much later, well again, he had joked about the effects of shock on himself, effects he had handled in others so many times over so many hospital years.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the odd thing was that I truly believed myself well and whole. I had a broken arm, a fractured ankle, burns, and I was bleeding. Nevertheless, I believed myself well.’

  He knew the physiology of it, of course he did, and yet it troubled him. In what other ways did he deceive himself out of his wounded life?

  *

  He walked on, his head exploding with sharp fireworks, his lungs pumping hard under their leather skin. He fumbled in his pockets and swallowed a tablet. He would feel better soon, better already, out of the tin morgue where the bodies were. He walked on scrambling up the rough, tufted sides of the concrete slipways where grass still found a crack and grew, in spite of progress. He got away from the oil and f
ish smells of the container port, and out to the real cliffs, where he found an aussichtspunkt that gave him a view and sheltered him from the wind. He opened the book and read.

  I, Handel, lover, fool, priest, madman, doctor and death warrant, have only time to tell what is left before the end.

  In the nightmare city where I have continued my days, I had charge of the new cancer hospital. Private, of course, but with a small wing of charitable status to be built on top of the old abattoir.

  The site was perfect; a io-acre stockyard with a Queen Anne house close by, to be saved as the flagship of the scheme. It was a poor part of the city. The borderline of the acceptable and the degraded. No one would rally against the planning permissions, a people with their hearts knocked out don’t open their mouths. This was the city of the unspeakable.

  I approved the choice. The site belonged to a man I knew, I treated his wife for headaches, depression, all the usual sorts of female complaints. I was not surprised when she developed cancer of the throat.

  This man, Jack, a life peer out of synthetics and preserves, had bought the site as a speculation, when quite a young man. He had sold his wife’s shares to do so, so his conceit that he was a self-made man was not strictly accurate, unless one counted his wife as his rib, which he did.

  On the day that I had planned to leave the city, a plan I had made many many times, I got a phone call from Jack urgently summoning me to the house. He did not explain but put down the telephone in an abrupt way as though he had been interrupted. I had my luggage ready and I had shut up my house. I could not wait and the weather was worsening. I decided to pass him over to a colleague, but as I was ringing the familiar number I remembered that, because of the day, because of the day that it was, I could not divert this call. In any case, Jack was calling me as a friend. Anyone to whom he had paid money became a friend; it was a way of getting the next thing free. ‘The old boy network’ he used to call it, and he was right, because we were old boys who had never made a success of growing up, and we were netted together, hopelessly, helplessly, forever.

  I set out through the bodiless streets and dirty air listening to Parsifal. Why did not Wagner make Klingsor a castrato role as he had planned? A magician has a wand he doesn’t need balls. Surely a transformer should be transformed? There’s a legend isn’t there, that Lucifer had no genitals until he rebelled against God, thereby grew the monstrous sacks and the thick pole of popular envy and fear. Cut them off and a man never growls with the beasts. Cut them off and a man sings with the angels again.

  There is a recording on a wax cylinder of the last castrato in the world. Reedy, unearthly, not beautiful, seductive, not a male voice nor a woman’s either. Klingsor, a magician, a transformer of parts.

  I have heard a castrato myself, yes, with my own ears, in Rome. There is no recording but I can play it to you if you will wait with me awhile.

  Through the streets to the house, lead against the lead sky.

  The front door was open. In the wide hallway and up the broad wooden staircase were thrashes of paint. Yellow ochre had been beaten into the restrained stripe of the wallpaper as though the sun itself were trying to burst out. The carpet, a typical oatmeal, had been used as a threshing floor for a flay of light. What had been the house lay in sorry stripes and through, above, below, beyond, emphatic were the umbers chromes ochres of a colourist revolution.

  I looked at the yellows and I wanted to laugh. On this terrible day I wanted to laugh. Ridiculous the sober house in its fairground coat.

  ‘She’s mad.’ Sir Jack came towards me. ‘She did this. Sophia did this. And not just this. The drawing-room is green. The kitchen is orange. My study, my study, is blood red.’

  ‘Where is your daughter?’

  ‘In the attic. I want you to certify her. Now.’ He took out his black laquered wallet stuffed with brown notes.

  ‘I will need a second opinion before I can commit her.’

  ‘Then go and buy one damn you, there’s the phone.’

  He picked up the receiver from the veneered hall table. His hand came away sticky and bright. He threw the telephone on to the floor and kicked it into a corner. His son ran into the hall in a pair of Wellingtons and a hotel dressing-gown. His hair was streaked blue. He was trembling.

  ‘All my clothes,’ he whispered. ‘All my clothes. Whitewash. She’s poured whitewash on all of my clothes.’

  I looked at them. Sir Jack, his shoes sinking into the thick paint on the thick carpet, the telephone whining brokenly by the open front door. His son, in white towelling and rubber boots, his black hair shot through with tints of crow. On the outskirts, mother, clinging to the daubed doorpost, like a devout at Passover. Her eyes had turned back into her head. She couldn’t see us. I looked at them. One by one they started up the stairs and I following.

  ‘She’s mad. She’s mad. She’s done this. She’s mad.’

  At the attic, the door was bolted from the outside but locked from the inside. Jack rammed it with his shoulder and came away howling. It was an original door at least six inches thick.

  ‘Bitch!’ he shouted. ‘Bitch, Bitch, I’ll kill you.’

  Then Matthew took up the cry and stripping off his white towelling dressing-gown, keeping on his rubber boots, he fought the door with his whole body until it buckled under him and fell in, straight, with him gasping on top of it and spread across it as though it were a raft at sea. He struggled up and I saw that he had ejaculated over the knob.

  ‘Where is she? Where is she?’

  She had gone.

  I got into my car and drove a few miles down the road. The rain had weighted into snow and as I pulled over to avoid a bad skid I saw a young woman walking lightly and with a quick spirit. I wound down the window to offer her a lift, I tried to reassure her by explaining that I was a doctor. I didn’t see her face but I heard her voice and it had yellow in it.

  Why should she trust me? Who am I anyway?

  Who indeed. What identifies a man? His job? His children? His religion? His dental record? It was easy in a white coat. Easier still in a dog collar. ‘This man belongs to God. Please return.’

  I have been returned. The verdict was Not Guilty.

  I left the dock cocooned in sympathy. The kind man with the kind face, musical voice, and long careful fingers, that shook slightly as he spoke. Handel. A free man.

  The lady in question has had a complication, but it is too late for me to make any difference to her now. Too late for her.

  And for me? Too late for me?

  I drove on to the station hoping to meet the morning train. The weight of the day hung around my neck, the day beginning to stink a little as it wore. I had no prayers.

  Was it the weak sun magnified by the snow that put a yellow glaze on the dirty streets? I could not get the yellow out of my eyes. I did not have jaundice, and this was not the sickly, sticky yellow of disease, but a firm clean drag of bright, over the optic nerve.

  What we think we see, we don’t see, I know that. I know that colour is an intervention of light. Light it was that made a gold crust on the baked snow. The biscuit-shaded snow out of the polluted sky. If it could find grace in the moment of a morning’s colour, then why not I? My grey heart light again.

  I, Handel, runaway and stray.

  He had his back against the smooth trig point which sheltered him against the wind. His collar was up under his chin, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. He had his eyes closed and the wind washed him. Cold wind-water splashing his cheeks. His cheeks felt long and hollow, fluvial channels salting up, as rivers do close to the sea. He was crying.

  He cried out of the heart of him, cried up all the lost days and mortal indecisions that he had thought were gone but were still stored in the skin and bone of him, a tank of pain, tapped.

  He had no space behind his eyes for the tears he found, tear-falling from the lachrymal glands. He dug his fists under his brow-bone but the tears ran through his tight fingers, would not be contained
now, his clothes were marshy. A heron landed above his head.

  Still the light. Light drained of colour but unclouded. Metal light that ran a roller-cutter edge between the sea and the sand, so that there was no blend of both, only a definite line of fallen grey. Sheeted light that shuttered the view.

  Still the light. The seagulls flew through it with difficulty, the light resisting the flap of their wings. Unfriendly bird light heavy with moisture. The sagging air.

  On the salt flats of his sorrow the man stared at the ending day. There was comfort in his pain, a recognition, something at last brought face to face that had lived back-turned for most of his life. His life, spent on the run from a crime that carried no penalty but the one its nature exacted. There was a dead place in him that reason could not quicken. A roped-off tomb unvisited by love. Always he had held back his heart from books, pictures, the passion of the music that meant so much to him, the nearness of her face. And it was not her face only. Every day he killed in himself the starts of feeling he feared. A daily suicide gone unnoticed by those who assumed he was still alive.

  Felo de se. The crime against himself God forbidden.

  Father I have sinned.

  Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience my child?

  Sins of conscience …

  The little baby in its warm coat of blood. There is more to the story than I told you at the time.

  It had long been the law in the city that, just as two doctors were required to certify a woman, so two doctors must give their consent before a woman could qualify for a legal abortion performed in a charitable hospital. The rule had been a success, few abortions were performed. Performed. Back stage things went on as usual, unrehearsed, unregulated, without proper equipment, but for a very good price.

  When I tell you that a young woman was sent to me hoping for the second consent that she needed, you will understand why I refused, won’t you? I am a Catholic. It is no use arguing with me over this. Res ipsa loquitur. Not true, Handel, not true. The thing doesn’t speak for itself does it? No, I admit, it does not, but ignorance is a great comforter. Very few Catholics are theologians. It is our method to leave the thinking to some and the obeying to many.