Francis Bacon in Your Blood (44 page)

There's a couple I know who both see an analyst. They're a good deal older than me, and they've always been very nice, almost parental, to me. They have a very fine collection of modern art and they often invite me to come and see their latest acquisition, even though we don't really have the same tastes in art. So they're not surprised when I call them and they ask me round right away for lunch because they've got a big, new Twombly, and even though I intensely dislike Twombly, it makes no difference now, and I go round and peer at their new acquisition and nod several times thoughtfully as if I approve. My collector friends have a lot of mirrors in their
apartment and I see how ghostly-looking I've become as I flit from time to time through them and it scares me, but what scares me more is the frightened look in my friends' eyes as they watch me and take on board how far I've fallen. But they are good-hearted and patient. I tell them a little about what has happened, a plain condensed version, and they arrange for me to see their analyst.

She's a Freudian, whatever that really means, and I've been to see her a couple of times. She's very formal and distant, perhaps that's Freudian, and she says very little. Before each session, I rehearse the ground I want to go over, a bit as though I were going to write it or, more accurately, put it on as a play – a little play about my own misery. I have main characters, such as my father and Rubin, Alice and the Polonaise, but there are others, and sometimes the others become more important as the plot develops, often in ways I haven't foreseen. I want to give things some shape rather than just deluge her with all the black thoughts that keep going through my mind. I want structure, and I want to keep it short because it costs an arm and a leg every time I have to inch several large banknotes on to her desk in payment. Perhaps that's Freudian too.

I spend most of my time at the moment constructing what I am going to tell her. I concentrate on bringing out the funny side of things as well, since misery is always full of potentially amusing details. I present them as sketches and when the analyst laughs I have the first feeling of pleasure that I've had in months. I make it my ambition now to make her laugh, it's always what I've preferred because I'm a clown at heart, and sometimes I find myself making up things simply to make her laugh. ‘
Vous avez beaucoup de ressources, Monsieur
,' she says to me at one point, and I take this in the context to mean I have bounce-back. I feel about as bouncy as a punctured ball, but I am oddly flattered if I can interest or amuse her, and I kid myself that she prefers listening to me rather than to all the other weedy-looking patients sitting around her waiting room.

Over the past few days we've had an infestation of rats in my building. It's spread all through this side of the Marais, like a plague. Untold thousands of them were sent fleeing when they did eventually dislodge the Halles marketplace, and most of the rats of course went underground. I don't know what's disturbed them again, perhaps new excavation in the area, but at night I hear them scuttering under the floorboards and gnawing at the wainscot along the walls. Sometimes I think I've imagined it and it's my mind playing tricks, but I see them in the daytime too, darting behind the radiators and then down some hole best known to themselves. They seem to be getting bolder by the day, and some of them cross the floor now in front of me, quite casually, as though I'm not there. They almost make a game of it, crisscrossing from different directions, sometimes running, sometimes merely ambling, out for a stroll, leaving an insolent abundance of their little turds behind.

They're right, I am barely there, and they must sense I'm no threat, but I did come to resent how much I had to pay the Freudian just to amuse her, and I've found someone else I can talk to who's very different, she's a Brazilian therapist who charges very little and we've been doing breathing exercises together in her little flat in Montmartre. I do everything she tells me to do, even absurd things like imagining I'm a baby again and crying, but I do cry, with the tears pouring out of me in a great flood of pent-up pain, even though I know that before all this, before I became so desperate and submissive, I would have laughed and refused outright. The Brazilian is very beautiful, with dark, flashing eyes, and I admire her, I am even falling in love with her, but I can't make her laugh. She is aloof and very determined, and now that she thinks I have reached the appropriate level we go out to the forest of Fontainebleau to have the space and the air and the solitude to let out the primal cry that she tells me will release all my deeper fears and tensions, and I can hardly believe it but I'm standing there opposite her in a clearing way into the forest, just the two of us, the therapist and the patient, and I'm
taking great lungfuls of air and screaming with all my might at the sky, the impassive pale cloudy sky overhead, and she is screaming too, louder than me, her screams are far more piercing and terrifying than mine, and as we pause, panting, to get our breath back I get a glimpse of her beautiful, fanatical eyes staring fixedly up through the branches of the pines and as she breaks into another bloodcurdling cry I know beyond doubt that, sick as I am, she is mad, madder than I could ever be, and I have to get out, out of this forest, out of Paris, break this circle, away from her, away from Rubin, away from the rats, away from myself, anywhere.

I still have one place to go, a last place I can crawl into like a rat. My old friend David Blow has had his ups and downs, too, and I know most of them, just as he knows mine. He comes from a family full of strange eccentrics, including the famously reclusive Stephen Tennant, and he's very tolerant of his friends' oddities and misfortunes. It's been a while since I've been in London, and when I arrive at David's large, comfortable flat, he looks at me, and while he jokes about taking me out for a few decent meals, he can see something has gone badly wrong. I give him the brief outline, it comes quite easily after doing it for the shrinks, and we relax and have a few drinks, and when I lie down on his sofa, which is somehow more reassuring than my bed in Paris, I manage to get a few consecutive hours' sleep for the first time in months. Being in London is doing me good in itself, because the distance helps me get a bit of perspective. After all the threats, I haven't heard from the MoMA lawyers and, as far as I know at least, there has been no full-page denunciation of my evil deeds in the press. Rubin has however published his riposte, bristling with references and footnotes, to my review in
Connaissance
, but it is so long and involved, and so seemingly unconnected to what I actually wrote, that I haven't been able to take it in. I just stared at it and felt sick. Apparently he's had a whole slew of negative reviews – I've seen one of them, by
Thomas McEvilley, that goes far further in taking the show apart than I did – and Rubin is charging around like a maddened bull having a go at all of them. He must have garnered a lot of praise as well, so I wonder why he has to try to silence all semblance of dissent. Somebody suggested to me that he'd slipped works from his own private collection into this landmark show so as to sell them at an increased price afterwards, but I've no idea if it's true.

I can't be in London and not call Francis. I haven't talked to him since this whole thing blew up because, even though I know he would give sound advice and be ready to help, I'm still upset by his volte-face over the book and I don't want him to know just how wounded and stricken I've been. I go round to the studio, which I'm always pleased to see because all the chaos of photos and paint and stuff on the floor is like a kaleidoscope of what's been going on in the latest paintings, and it's oddly comforting, as if I'm not the only one to have so much mess slopping around inside me. We share a couple of bottles of champagne, which loosens my tongue, and I give him the briefest overview of the run-in with Rubin. To begin with I can see a certain cruel amusement, even satisfaction, in his face, perhaps because he thinks I've had the comeuppance I deserve, but also, when I come to think about it, because he hates the press, and probably has done ever since, way back, they dismissed a couple of his very earliest paintings as ‘a piece of a cheese on a stick' and ‘a pair of dentures on a tripod' or some such facile nonsense. But as he takes in how much I've changed, and how desperate I probably sound as well as look, his tone alters and he suggests we meet for dinner tomorrow at the Ritz.

Plush hotels seem almost designed to make you feel a bit shabby but I find I don't much care as I hand my crumpled mac in at the Ritz's cloakroom. I'm also pleased, once we're seated in the elegant restaurant, that after weeks of barely touched pasta the Whitstable oysters and steamed turbot slip down so easily.
I'm a bit drunk already, because I've been off the bottle for a while and I'm trying to pace myself for what I imagine will be a very boozy evening ahead when Francis, who's been topping up my glass with the claret, suggests we go to Crockford's. I'm intrigued by the idea, not only because I've never been gambling with Francis before, but also because I've virtually never been gambling – apart from once at the casino in Monte Carlo, where I wanted to see the
salons privés
Francis often mentions and where, in about ten minutes, I stupidly lost half the money that Alice and I had earmarked for our subsequent holiday in Corsica.

That won't be a problem this time because I don't have much more than a cab fare on me, and when I mention this to Francis as we're ushered very cordially into the roulette room at Crockford's he nods and, as if it were customary in the circumstances, he hands me a wad of large banknotes, which we change for some brightly coloured chips. I don't have time to protest because he's already off among the green-baize tables, settling a little bunch of chips here, another there. I walk round to get the general hang and start playing as well, without any system, betting on a couple of random numbers and impairs without really thinking about it, because the whole thing seems arbitrary, not to say silly, when you're using money that's not yours and you never even expected to have.

I start circling round the tables, among a few jovial punters finishing off an evening and a larger number of pale habitués, many of them slender, almost emaciated women who are gambling as if their lives depended on it. With beginner's luck I've started winning a lot more than I've wagered. Francis comes back, saying he's completely cleaned out, and I give him my winnings and simply take another turn round the room, savouring the champagne that's being liberally served free of charge and watching the raptness of the other gamblers crouched over the baize.

Eventually Francis comes back and tells me he's lost it all so we should go and get some more money from the studio. I expect him to be downcast but he's exuding pleasure and vitality. Out of thin air Crockford's provides a chauffeured car and we set off towards South Kensington, and Francis starts up a bit of banter with the driver, who's wearing a peaked chauffeur's cap.

‘Are you Mr Bacon then?' the driver says after a while.

‘Mr Bacon, Mrs Bacon or Miss Bacon,' says Francis. ‘However you like it, dear.'

We go up to the studio while the Daimler purrs on the cobblestones outside.

‘I
know
I've got some money here somewhere,' Francis says, picking up odd tins of dried paint out of the mess on the floor and shaking them.

I join in, beginning to giggle at the scene.

‘Ah, there we are,' Francis says triumphantly, shaking a tin over his head as scores of notes come floating down.

We collect them all up, shove them into Francis's pockets and go back to Crockford's.

Francis wanders back to the tables and loses even more quickly than before. Once again, this does not appear to affect him. On the contrary, he appears exultant, as if losing were far more desirable and welcome than winning. Once again, the Daimler awaits us and drops me in Knightsbridge before taking Francis home. Francis seems particularly keen that we should meet again tomorrow, and although I'm slightly anxious that he might turn if he sees too much of me, I agree. I'm still quite high on the wine and my win.

Next evening is almost like a replica. We have a delicious dinner, but at the Connaught this time.

‘I've got the money you gave me,' says Francis when we sit down, and he passes an even thicker wad of cash to me under the table.

‘But Francis, it was your money,' I protest weakly.

‘No,' he says, very firmly, in a voice I have learnt not to counter. ‘It's the money you won and lent to me.'

After dinner we go back to Crockford's and start gambling. I am still as inexpert but I play with a bit more purpose, while still feeling it's play money, like Monopoly notes, I'm using. I have several wins, no doubt modest in comparison to the sums in play all around, but when I tot the total up, I have made more than I earn in a year. I scrape my chips together and have them turned back into hard cash.

Francis arrives beaming. I suspect he's lost again, but he's clearly undaunted.

‘I'm absolutely ravenous,' he says. ‘Why don't we go to Annabel's and have some bacon and eggs?'

The chauffeur whisks us down the street into Berkeley Square.

‘It's there,' says Francis, chuckling. ‘There where all those things with cockades in their hats are standing.'

The car stops at Annabel's and the footmen hold the door while we clamber out.

There's more champagne, and when the bacon and eggs appear Francis orders a very fine Château Latour. I find I'm hungry too, although I think my appetite is for the sheer luxury and fun of the evening rather than food.

Then we go back to champagne and sit near the dance floor which is raked by coloured strobe lighting. The music is good and I still recognize all the hits they're playing. There are a few dancers on the floor. On the sofa next to us there are four girls laughing among themselves.