A Sight for Sore Eyes (6 page)

greying hair, a scent bottle in which the perfume had grown yellow and viscid with age, a comb whose teeth were gummed together with dark-grey grease, a cardboard box that had once held Terry's All Gold chocolates, a glass ashtray containing pins, hairgrips, scraps of cottonwool, a dead fly, the top of a ballpoint pen and, horribly, a piece of broken fingernail. And all this sitting on a greyed and stained crocheted lace mat, rumpled in the middle and curled at its fringed edges, like an island in a dusty sea after a nuclear explosion. Teddy nearly swung out his arm to sweep it all on to the floor. His father wouldn't notice, wouldn't see anything amiss for years, for ever. Something stopped him doing that, simple curiosity as to what was inside the box. If it was still what had originally been there he imagined them coated in mould, the ghosts of chocolates, pale phantom cubes and hemispheres and shell-shapes. But the chocolates had long been eaten. This box was where Eileen had kept her jewellerv. Teddy had never seen her wear any of it, ropes of pearls with peeling surfaces, a green glass necklace, a scottie dog brooch, a copper bracelet for keeping rheumatism at bay - it said so, engraved on it - a necklace apparently woven out of plastic-covered thread. Then he saw what it actually was. So you could crochet jewellerv too. He tipped out the lot. Right at the bottom, like an orchid planted in a bed of thistles, was a ring. Just as his mother had done, all those years ago, in the Ladies at Broadstairs, he saw its worth. Not its probable value, as she had done, but its beauty. He laid it in the palm of his hand and turned it this way and that for the diamond to catch the light. The diamond was large and deeply glowing and richly flashing, with rainbows skimming its facets and rainbows cast from it to dance up and down the dirty wall. Inside the setting of the diamond and the sparkling shoulders, the ring was clogged with the same kind of epidermal detritus as Eileen's comb. He curled his lip in disgust at the dark grease caking the gold band and delicately fashioned sockets. Where had it come from? Had she ever worn it? It ought to be cleaned, he would find out how you cleaned a diamond ring. But first, after these explorations, he would have a bath. The neighbours, abandoning slanderous gossip and unkind judgements as people do when tragedy strikes, said that Jimmy's not lasting long after his wife's death went to show what a devoted couple they were. They couldn't live without each other. Not that Jimmy had died, but he had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after suffering a heart attack in the pub. He had been standing at the bar with a pint of draught Guinness in front of him, talking to anyone who would listen about race relations in nord-i London. Or, more precisely, about the conduct of the newsagent of Indian extraction, though born in Bradford, who had sold out of copies of the Sun before Jimmy managed to visit his shop. 'So I said to Paid the blackie,' said Jimmy, using the witty sobriquet he believed was his own invention, 'I said to him, you're not in Cal-bloody-cutta now, you know, you're not among the snake-charmers and the cow-buggerers no more, and he went -well, not white, not that, do me a favour - no, he went the colour of the curry he has with his fuckin' chips and...' Pain cut off whatever Jimmy had intended to say next. He clutched the upper part of his left arm with his right hand, an action which seemed firstly to pull him forward, then double him up, and to release a low groan from his slackening mouth. The groan rose to a throaty howl as Jimmy buckled at the knees and collapsed, sprawling, to the floor. Though existing for a long time without a telephone, the Brexes had acquired one ten years before, largely for Keith's plumbing business. Keith was on the phone, talking to a woman who had water coming through her bathroom ceiling, when a policeman came to the door. Keith was in a dilemma, whether to go to the aid of the bathroom woman or get down the hospital. He came into the dining-room where Teddy was sitting on his bed, drawing a design for a footstool. 'The whole family's breaking up,' he moaned. 'You'd best get down there and see your dad, you can come on the back of the bike with me and I'll drop you off on my way to Cricklewood.' 'No, thanks,' said Teddy. 'I'm busy.' The footstool would be beautiful, a creation of simple lines and smooth, gleaming surfaces. He closed his eyes, imagining a future life from which all ugliness was banished.

Chapter 7

Back at college a few days later, Teddy attended a lecture on the Joyden School. It was given by a visiting professor and he wasn't obliged or even expected to attend. 'Fine art' had no part in his course, but he admired the work of A'Lichael Joyden, Rosalind Smith and Simon Aipheton, samples of which he had seen reproduced in a Sunday supplement, and he wanted to hear what Professor Mills had to say about it. As always spotlessly dean, with newly washed hair and scrubbed fingernails, Teddy was dressed in his usual immaculate near-rags. He had no money for clothes and shopped, when he had to, at Oxfam and the Sue Ryder shop. His mother had always dressed him from these establishments, he was used to it and took no interest in what he wore. On this day he had on blue jeans, like everyone else in the lecture hail of the Potter Building, a snowy though shabby T-shirt and a dark-blue sweat-shirt that had been bought new from C & A by the Sue Ryder donor twelve years before. The girl who sat down next to him gave him one of those appraising looks he was accustomed to. She was pretty enough. He took virtually no interest in people's characteristics or attitudes or opinions, but he always noticed whether they were good-looking or the reverse. This one had a bright, sharp-featured face and a neat little body, but to use a phrase of his grandmother's, she looked shop-soiled. As if, he thought with an inner shudder, she had been through too many grubby hands and rumbled on too many beds as smelly as Keith's. 'Hi,' she said. He nodded at her. 'I haven't seen you here before.' He raised his swallow's-wing eyebrows. 'I'd remember you, believe me,' she said flirtatiously. 'There are some people you don't forget.' 'Is that so?' It was an interrogatory he often used and it meant very little. He forgot everyone except those he was obliged to be with in daily proximity. 'Tell me something.' She was smiling now. 'Anything!' 'How would you clean a ring?' 'What?' 'How would you clean a diamond ring?' 'For God's sake, I don't know.' She gave him a resentful glance, but seemed to be considering the question. She shrugged. 'My gran puts hers in gin. Leaves it in a glass of gin overnight.' The lecturer was coming on to the podium. 'Right,' he said. 'Thanks.' Teddy had wondered how Professor Mills would show examples of the paintings and not, he hoped, by sticking reproductions up on a board. To his relief he saw that slides were to be used. The lights in the auditorium were dimmed a little and the first picture appeared on the screen. It was Michael Joyden's Come Hither Blues and Teddy hadn't seen it before. The pop group with whom Joyden and Aipheton had been friends, and whose music they had loved, appeared on the canvas in swirls of colour and flashes of light, so that strangely you could almost hear the picture. The girl muttered something about not being able to see to make notes. Teddy ignored her. Professor Mills talked about Joyden and Smith and the influence of the Fauvists, their bold style and use of brilliant colour. While Rosalind Smith demonstrated this influence perhaps more than any other member of the Joyden School, Aipheton owed more to Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard than to Matisse and Rouault. Some called his wor1~ retrograde, but the lecturer claimed for it a striking modernity comparable at least to Hockney or Freud. Teddy barely knew who most of these people were. Lucien Freud he knew, but thought his work ugly, no matter how good it might be. He had seen a reproduction of one of Aipheton's paintings on a flier put through the Neasden letter-box and now here it was again, as large as life up on the screen: Music in Hanging Sword Alley. Come Hither again, this time the four musicians leaned languidly against a concrete wall of the building where the recording studio was, their instruments at their feet. Marc Syre, the lead guitarist, had his mouth wide open, his head hanging backwards and his long hair steaming down his back. The date of the painting, Professor Mills said, was 1965. 'My murn's got all their old singles,' whispered the girl. 'She was a Come Hither groupie - can you believe it?' Teddy shrugged. He wasn't interested in music of any kind. All those people were probably dead by now, anyway. People recorded in paint, that was another thing. Like this next one, Aipheton's masterpiece, the most famous of the Joyden School, the one that was in the Tate, the one that was in all books of modern art and found its wax' into superior calendars. Until now Teddy had only seen it in that Sunday magazine, but it was really on its account that he had come to this lecture. Marc and Haji-jet in Orcadia P/ace. The two young people were in a sunlit garden or courtyard in front of what looked like a tree. But a tree without trunk or branches, more a curtain of leaves. All this was mere background to the man and the woman who stood a little apart, joined to each other by his extended right hand, her left, the fingertips lightly linked. He was dark, bearded, long-haired, dressed in dark blue, she a red-haired beauty, with a russet curling mane, the precise same shade as her long Regency dress. Their eves were concentrated on each other with, it seemed, a tender love and yearning. Passion informed the painting so that after all these years and in spite of the million eyes that had looked on it and the thousand commentaries made on it, this couple's love remained fresh and eternally enduring. 'Marc Syre, as your parents no doubt could tell you,' said Professor Mills, 'was a member of Come Hither and as such made himself a fortune which enabled him, as early as nineteen sixty-five, the date of this work, to occupy this house in St John's Wood and enjoy this ri's in urbe. Believe me, there is a Georgian house behind all those ivy or vine leaves, or whatever they are. Harriet Oxenholme was what we should call today his live-in girlfriend. 'But we need not concern ourselves unduly with these people, who are important only insofar as Simon Aipheton was their friend and they became, by a most happy chance for subsequent generations, his subjects. What we must look at is Aipheton's arresting use of colour, his subtle handling of light and his curious ability to convey with extreme economy powerful emotion and, indeed, sexual passion. He had in mind, of course, as template or exemplar, Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride, but before we discuss that, let us first look at the play of light and shade...' Teddy decided to take himself down to the Tate Gallery and confront the real thing. He thought about leaves and carving leaves, something like what Grinling Gibbons did, but modern, leaves for today. A picture frame of leaves or a mirror - yes, why not make a mirror? When the lecture was over and the lights went up again the girl next to him looked at the notes she had struggled to make. 'Would you call that picture erotic?' she asked him. 'Mills did.' 'Did he? Then I will. I'm Kelly. What your name?' 'Keith,' said Teddy. 'What happened to your finger, Keith?' He said gravely, 'My uncle bit it off.' This time she didn't believe. She giggled. 'Would you feel like coming out for a drink, Keith?' 'I've got a tutorial,' said Teddy. He got up and walked away without a backward glance. Why had he lied instead of just saying no? He'd say~ it next time. Of course he hadn't a tutorial and he had no essay to write. No one seemed to care in his course whether you ever wrote anything or not. He was going home to perform a task, or begin to perform a task, he had for several years longed to do. His uncle would be our, putting in a power shower in a flat in Golders Green and afterwards visiting Jimmy in hospital. Keith, who had never shown much affection for his brother in the past, or indeed for anyone, had become a faithful visitor at Jimmy's bedside. So no one would be at home to see or to hear. The Edsel, a delicate pale-yellow and spotless, its engine several times rebuilt, stood on the extended concrete pad under the new carport with its four metal posts and its gleaming roof of corrugated polvtetrafluoroethylene. It was - or seemed - the largest of any cars Keith had had, too large to be parked horizontally across the garden, its bonnet and grid like a pursed mouth facing the back fence, its huge finned boot with high taillights close up against the french windows. Next to it, underneath where the motor bike stood when Keith was at home, was a long slick of oil. The carport, designed to shelter a big car, had taken up even more of the space than the original pad and Teddy's tool collection was crowded up into a corner, in the right angle where two fences met. He lifted up the plastic sheeting and shook off the water which the previous night's rain had left in its folds. Underneath, from a box and then from their newspaper wrappings, he took a saw, a hacksaw, chisels of varying sizes and a hammer. Mr Chance had owned nothing so crude as an axe, but they had one Grandma Brex had used in distant wood-chopping days. Teddy found it, damp and blunt, among the welter of mould-coated rubbish under the sink. He carried his tools into the dining-room and began. It was five o'clock when he started and by seven-thirty he had sawn the legs off all the chairs and the arms off the carvers, sawn off their backs and prised out the seat cushions. He didn't want to stop to eat, so he sharpened the axe on Mr Chance's whetstone and started chopping. Within half an hour he had reduced the six chairs to firewood. That was when the people next door banged on the wall. They banged a few times and then the phone started ringing. Teddy guessed it was them, a yuppie couple who had bought Mr Chance's house and thought themselves a cut above the rest of the people in the street. He ignored the banging and the phone, but his axe work was done for the time being and he began sawing up the sideboard. The man next door came round and rang the bell when Teddy started chopping again at nine. Teddy let him ring a few times and then he went to the door with Kenneth Clark's Civilisation in his hand, open at the chapter called 'Grandeur and Obedience'. 'Look, what's going on? What is this?' 'My uncle's making a coffin,' said Teddy. 'He's got a deadline.' The neighbour was one of those who blush when they think they've been told a lie or are being sent up, but don't know how to handle it. 'What deadline?' he said. 'Ten p. m.' said Teddy. 'Nearly over. Good-night.' He shut the door hard and gave it a kick. Saying sorry wasn't a habit of his. Before going back to his dismemberment of the furniture he went upstairs, found the gin bottle under Keith's bed and poured an inch of it into the egg-cup he had taken up with him. Into it went the diamond ring. Teddy put the egg-cup under his own bed. He chopped up the sideboard in double-quick time, stacked a woodpile four feet high and was in the kitchen eating a large can of baked beans on three rounds of toast when Keith came in at twenty-five to eleven. 'You're eating late,' said Keith. Teddy didn't reply. Keith set down his two plastic carriers, full of bottles and beer cans, lit a cigarette with a match and dropped the match on the floor. 'Don't you want to know how your dad is?' 'What do you think?' said Teddy. 'You watch your mouth. You haven't been near your dad since he went in there and that's all of two fuckin' months. Poor old sod's on his way out and you don't give a fourpenny fuck.' 'How about you watching your mouth?' said Teddy. 'Or washing it out? With like cyanide.' He went into the dining-room and banged the door. But he started laughing when he was inside. That night he slept like a log. Or like a Brex, they were all heavy sleepers, though he was sometimes the exception. The following evening he sawed the legs off the table and chopped them up, but not the table top. Late in the day, but not too late, he saw what a fine piece of mahogany it was. He took it carefully apart and stacked the boards against the wall. The chopped wood made a pile to occupy a space roughly the size the sideboard had been. The only way to get rid of it that came to mind was to take three or four pieces with him in a plastic carrier every time he left the house. Rather like someone disposing of a body, half a leg one day, a hand another, finally the head. Fortunately - he had never thought of it as being fortunate before - the place was awash with plastic bags. They filled the kitchen drawers and flopped out when you opened the cupboard under the sink. Keith got them from the Safeway when he bought his booze and he never took used ones back. Recycling in any shape or form had no place in his life-style. When Teddy went to get the tube to college he'd take some of those bits of leg with him in a bag and put them in a waste bin. As Kelly's grandma had predicted, the gin had cleaned the ring. Lumps of grey waxy substance, one with a hair embedded in it, floated on the surface of the liquid in the egg-cup. Teddy sniffed it with a shudder. He was preserving another virginity, that of never letting alcohol pass his lips. The ring sparkled in the morning light. Teddy wondered whose it had been before it came on to his mother's hand. Grandma Brex's? Surely not. More likely it was stolen, but he doubted if his father had ever had the courage to steal anything. Perhaps he was wrong and the ring was worthless, perhaps it had come out of a Christn-ias cracker. I-lie questioned if something so beautiful could be valueless. One day he would find a woman and give~ it to her.