Francis Bacon in Your Blood (27 page)

‘Hey you, yes you, frogs' legs, let's have a refill, twiggez-vous? I know the bugger speaks English. Ah cahm on, let's see you down this end for a fucking change!'

The shaggy and the smooth drinking friends, rounded up at Muriel's and brought over to cheer the home side, are making few concessions to being in foreign parts.

I've agreed to join John, Dickie and Denis at a café beside the Gare de Lyon before going on to Francis's big banquet at the Train Bleu, and word has clearly reached the whole Soho contingent that this is to be the pre-dinner meeting-point.

‘What a rabble,' John says in urbane dismay.

‘All they're interested in is getting plastered and abusive,' says Dickie, casting an anxious eye on Denis, whose wine-lit countenance is twinkling at a riposte he has just shot. ‘I do hope they don't think all Englishmen are like that.'

We move to the other side of the bar in an attempt to dissociate ourselves.

‘Four, cat-rer, bee-airs, comprenny? And chop-chop while you're at it!'

The circle of red faces darkens with barely bottled mirth. Their spokesman is waving twice two fingers in the barman's offended face.

‘Oh they'll think we're barbarians to a man,' John sighs, sipping his pastis. ‘To think we'll be stuck with this lot all evening. I
had seen myself,
au contraire
, waltzing at Maxim's until dawn, ospreys in my hair and my throat ablaze with diamonds. But that is clearly not to be.'

A few more of Francis's friends have come into the café. I notice Sonia talking rapidly to one of the beer drinkers. She's looking distraught, pushing her hair back with nervous, jerky movements. The man she's talking to laughs. Sonia slaps him round the face.

We're all looking at her as she comes over towards us.

‘Well, you must know,' she says to me.

‘I'm sorry – what?' I say, rolling the liquorice taste round my mouth.

Sonia is staring at me with red, watery eyes.

‘That George is dead,' she says.

‘Dead?' I say. It has no connection with anything. Seeing John, the others, the exhibition. I'm staring at her now.

‘I know what you're thinking,' she says rapidly. ‘But it wasn
^'
t that. It was a heart attack. The alcohol stopped his heart.'

The others say nothing. They are looking down at the ground. In the silence, the café seems to sway in its bright yellow light.

George was dead.

‘What about Francis?' I say eventually.

‘Francis?' Sonia says. ‘Well, you can imagine.'

The tears run down her face.

As the scores of guests settle into their places at the long tables going the whole way down the cavernous Belle Epoque restaurant the word begins to spread like wildfire. Michel and Zette Leiris, looking sad and dignified, sit on either side of Francis. Opposite him is Isabel Rawsthorne, whom Francis has painted almost as often as George, and whose majestic presence in the exhibition has the mesmerizing power of an Egyptian goddess. Her delicately beautiful face, reddened and pouchy from drink, swings from side to side, looking uncannily like Bacon's blurred
portrait heads of her. From her turning head a torrent of confused words comes pouring out as if beyond control. Now George is dead! First Peter, now George! George was found dead in the hotel! Slumped dead on the lavatory in their room! Dead from an overdose! Alcohol and sleeping pills!

With the speed of bad news, the message reaches everyone in the huge vaulted room before the first course (
filets de sole Favart
) is served, and what had begun as a prestigious
dîner de vernissage
turns into a strange wake where nothing has been officially announced and there is no ceremony, but the death is on everybody's lips. Poor George – I knew he was a terrible alcoholic and quite out of his depth in Francis's world, but I had no idea! Poor Francis – on this day of all days! But remember the Tate opening, when Peter Lacy died! Can you see Francis – he's behaving as if nothing has happened! What did you expect? He's not the kind to collapse in grief. Did you hear that when Francis took President Pompidou round the show they stopped to admire the very picture where George is shown sitting on the lavatory because it's just been bought by a French museum? What can Francis have thought – that he was being punished at the very height of his success, that once again the Furies had come to claim him?

Isabel's high, insistent voice rises like a rant, drowning out all whispered commentary in a stream of increasingly incomprehensible phrases that sound as if she were speaking in tongues, inducing an awed silence in every corner of the room. She is addressing Francis opposite her, as if he had asked her a question and she can no longer contain the truth now or for the future as it wells uncontrollably up in her. And everybody sits there, stunned, as she appears to be saying that this is what she had seen coming, fatally, and now that it was there it was final, and this was the price that had to be paid. And Francis sits there immobile, his head bowed.

Silently and efficiently the waiters have been darting round the tables plying the numbed guests with the Rully Clos Saint-Jacques
and the Côte de Brouilly Château Thivin, both 1970, as frequently and plentifully as possible. The wine first sharpens, then begins to soothe, the brutal shock. Towards the end of the evening, once the whispers and the knowing looks have faded and the dessert (
tarte tatin
/
friandises
) has been cleared away, Francis stands up, as if spellbound, and gives a simple vote of thanks to the Leirises for having hosted such a wonderful evening and to everyone for having been present.

Having seen Francis go through that whole ordeal yesterday I can't imagine he'll take on any more engagements, but not only has he been at the Grand Palais all day being interviewed and filmed but he's insisted that the small dinner party organized a while back by Miss Beston for this evening should go ahead. Francis does seem to be behaving as if nothing has happened, it's true. He looks pale and strained, and he's got a bad cut on his lip, but otherwise you wouldn't have any idea that an intimate friend of his has just died and in a way to make him feel as responsible and guilty as possible. Could it be that he's still on such a high, having just realized the greatest ambition of his life, that the fact hasn't sunk in? It seems unlikely, particularly as he will have spent the day dealing with the police and the formalities surrounding a death abroad. I know Francis has an unusual capacity to withstand mental and physical pain, but when I arrive at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, the very scene of the death, I expect to see a broken man.

Francis is sitting in the lobby, drinking whisky and talking to a French couple whose solemn bearing, I realize, belies advanced drunkenness.

‘It's not only the way you get that whole feeling of Dublin, but the way Joyce reinvented technique,' Francis is saying animatedly. He looks quite relaxed and casual in a thick, cashmere sweater. ‘Even so I myself prefer Proust because in Proust you get something quite new as well as everything that's gone before. It might be absurd to compare them. Both have genius. For me,
genius is what breaks the mould of accepted thought. Will you have a whisky too, Michael?'

It's as if, to take him to whatever the next point in existence turns out to be, Francis has put on an old gramophone record, one he knows backwards.

‘They are marvellous, all those techniques that Joyce introduced, yet I think Proust was even more extraordinary because he invented within tradition. Is that the right time? I never know. Ah, here we are.
Merci beaucoup, Monsieur. Voilà pour vous. Merci.
Perhaps we should see if the taxi's here. Here's to you. What d'you say? No, I've never read
Finnegans Wake
, I've never been able to. By that time, I think, he'd made the whole thing too abstract. He'd sort of gone over the top with it and it became abstract – and that's much less interesting, of course. Just like abstract art, which I always think of as free fancy about nothing, and of course nothing comes from nothing. What? Do you think we should go? What was the address? Ah that's right, I think the others are meeting us there. What did you say the address was, Michael? I'm sorry, it's mad, I'll forget my own address next. Ah yes, rue Rennequin. Right. In the 17th. Perhaps we'd better go then.'

The taxi drops us at La Mère Michel. Miss Beston and three other guests who have worked on the Grand Palais exhibition are already seated round the little restaurant's central table. In between introductions, Francis orders several bottles of Muscadet and, with my help at the other end, sets about getting a maximum of drink into his guests. Then he draws attention to the restaurant's celebrated pike in
beurre blanc
. Only his guests' pleasure seems to have any importance. He recalls someone's aversion to oysters and insists on a full dozen for those who like them.

The thought of George is on everyone's mind for the first half-hour, then as the meal gets under way it begins to fade. For most of Francis's guests this evening, George has never possessed a
specific existence. He had at most been a picturesque adjunct to someone well known, and there seems to be a tacit agreement around the table that the conversation should be kept as far away from any reference to him as possible. My experience of death is limited to losing two grandparents and a friend when very young at school. This is the closest I've been to it, and I'm horrified and deeply frightened by the blank it leaves behind. There was George a couple of days ago at the Grand Véfour, ill at ease but fully present, and now it seems as if he is swiftly becoming little more than a memory.

In the lulls between replying to carefully phrased questions and topping up everyone's glass, Francis is clearly elsewhere. He is paler than ever, and I wonder if he has managed to get any rest at all over the last few days, particularly since George probably ingested all the Tuinal tablets he depends on to snatch a couple of hours' sleep.

Staring in front of him, with the sleeves of his sweater pushed up to the elbows, Francis suddenly breaks through the last two hours' politesse:

‘And when I saw George again this afternoon on that film they did for the exhibition, I thought how good-looking he was. He'd never seemed so present and so marvellous.'

Miss Beston is crying into her handkerchief.

‘There it is. He's dead now. Nothing can be done.'

Francis looks down the table with a small tight smile, repeating:

‘Nothing can be done.'

We all shift in uneasy sympathy
_.
No one speaks.

Francis leans forward in an effort to say something more, gazing fixedly into the middle of the table. Then he glances up and through his guests. No one dares look back at him.

The waitress starts collecting the empty plates.

A thin, elderly woman emerges from the kitchen and stands blinking in our direction, curious to see what the large party that
has eaten and drunk so much is like. As she comes into Francis's vision he appears to recognize her and stretches out both arms.

‘You just have to keep your hand in,' she is saying as she comes closer. ‘That's the real secret. And the right shallots, mind.'

‘Well, it was simply delicious,' Francis says to her, as if in a dream. ‘I sometimes do it, it sounds mad, but I sometimes do it with margarine. It's never as good as yours, though. Of course.'

‘It's keeping your hand in that makes proper
beurre blanc
,' Mère Michel repeats, standing by his side, looking at the quietened guests. ‘I make it every day.'

‘Well, there you are,' Francis says, raising his arms higher in recognition.

‘What beautiful arms you have,' one of the women from the Grand Palais says, her own braceleted brown arms propping up a face of smiling admiration.

‘Are they? Are they beautiful?' Francis asks. He looks stern and holds them both in front of his face, considering them critically.

‘Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are simply beautiful. There's nothing you can do about those things. That's simply the way they are.'

The loss and the drink and the absurdity settle like a shroud over our table.

‘But so have you,' Francis says, starting out of absorption elsewhere and taking hold of Mère Michel's arm. ‘You have beautiful arms too, Madame,' he says, pushing up her jumper sleeve to reveal a thin, old woman's arm and holding it out for the table to admire.

Mère Michel stands there, smiling through her uncertainty.

Letting her arm go, Francis says to her directly, discreetly, as if only the two of them could hear:

‘It's never worked, has it, life with someone else? Those things never work out. Do you live with a husband, Madame?'

‘He's dead, Monsieur, he—'

‘I know he's dead. It never worked, I know that. It was impossible from the start.'