by Tim Finch
I was late to the mind-cleansing exertion of chopping wood. Gladstone was a great advocate of it, I read, in the excellent Jenkins biography I also have it with me. Up in Urke in summer I lay in my own stockpiles of logs; far more than I will ever use in winter. One day someone will assume ownership of the cabin and the woodpile with it. Note that I don’t say inherit. That thought hits me hard for a moment. But at the same time, the neat gin hits the spot. With that discordant hint of the savoury that the olive infuses. I know already that I will drink too much this evening, but what the hell! It’s been a hell of a day. Sitting here with my martini by the fire is to be in a good place, however. The lap of luxury, one might say. And the sweet smell of woodsmoke is immensely calming. What type of wood is it? Some species of mountain fir, I suppose.
I find I am thinking about you without any great anguish. I am missing you, but I am not lacerated by the thought. I have the drink to thank, no doubt. This is why I drink. For the blur and swim. A sharp mind is a razor’s edge. Let me sink into befuddlement, will you. Let me recall in the blur and swim a Ghent that never was, but meant so much.
GOOD MAN
He was wearing a military-style greatcoat, theatrically long, its hem, sodden from the slush on the pavements, sweeping the floor. The slight young woman at the front desk relieved him of it and reeled under its weight. A colleague had to help her hoist the coat on to one of the brass hooks in the red-curtained cloakroom area, where it steamed like a racehorse in the winning enclosure.
Max, meanwhile, was unwinding what looked like a hand-knitted scarf and may well have been – hand-knitted, that is – though doubtless it was bought from a designer boutique at great expense even so. Who, after all, could you imagine knitting for him? Perhaps you, once. When you were a girl. No one since.
The young woman put the scarf over her arm and waited while he removed his flat cap, which was one of those bigger, baggier Depression-era caps, this particular one made out of a patchwork of loud checked tweeds. Before handing it over, he made a show of thwacking the cap against his thigh to dislodge the covering of sleety snow from its crown. Silver droplets cascaded on to the large red doormat of the restaurant, which was inlaid with its name – Operzimmer – in gold-coloured bristles. As a final flourish, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a huge handful of coins, which he clattered into the brass tips plate.
It was quite an entrance, then; the entrance that Max knows is expected of him these days, having created that expectation himself over many years. Heads had turned at all of the tables nearer the door. And he was not done.
‘Ed-VARD!’ he bawled, spotting me suddenly – or pretending to – sitting on my own at a prominent table, big enough for six. (He had booked the table; and we were dining à deux, as far as I knew.) He then punched the air in triumph like the rider of that racehorse in the winner’s enclosure and did a little jig on the spot. Now the whole restaurant was looking at Max, marvelling, thinking: Who on earth is that?
Then quickly: It isn’t, is it?
(He was thirty minutes late for our lunch, incidentally. I didn’t mention it and neither did he. And before you say anything, I was quite happy. I’d had an aperitif or two – and I had my book. Bech at Bay, as you insist. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Max. It is always an event.)
The first thing to mention about him is that he was heavily bearded, which very much suited him, I must say, even though it made him look a decade older than his fifty-six years, the beard being predominantly and strikingly white. He was bulkier than when I last saw him too, and did not appear to be – wasn’t would be a more precise way of putting it – especially clean. (By now, he was at the table and had hauled me into a back-slapping man-hug.) He gave off the air – a pungent whiff of it – of a man who had just rolled out of another man’s bed, leaving this other man’s wife sleeping the sleep of a fully sated woman – which might very well have been the case, of course. Though the aroma wasn’t quite that – or not just that.
Too much information?
Several people had recognised Max by this stage, and the next few minutes were taken up with him hauling them into gamey embraces, grabbing their phones off them and taking selfies – expertly, I might add. Each one was shown off delightedly by Max to all those clustered around us as if it was some sort of miracle: Look at this phone! It takes pictures! I’ve taken a picture! Look, isn’t it a good one!
‘Plenty of practice,’ he explained, when I observed that he had mastered a tricky skill there. (And yes, I will admit I have taken a few selfies myself. Me on the mountain; me in the main square: that sort of thing. Though I do sometimes ask myself, who am I taking them for? Who is going to look at them in years to come? Me, I suppose.) His big entrance complete, Max had settled down at the table and was studying the wine list. First upside down; then the right way up. It struck me as he did so that this explanation of his skill at selfies had allowed Max to demonstrate self-deprecatory charm while simultaneously drawing attention to his celebrity – and that this was typical of him. ‘On the other hand, I’ve almost forgotten how to sign an autograph,’ he added from behind the wine list. It was a huge, plump, red-leather performance containing what must have been forty pages of wines. (In the end, he decided against wine. For both of us until I chirped up. I had a couple of large glasses of Riesling. He had a glass of milk.) ‘So, it’s very much plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, n’est-ce pas?’
It was also very Max somehow – and somehow lovable – that he delivered the famous epigram in full. The atrocious French accent added to the effect. He has never managed to pick up any of the major European languages despite living for periods of years in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. All that’s happened is that his English has become oddly accented, as if it isn’t his first, his only, language.
‘Said who first, incidentally?’ he added, looking over another new adornment or affectation of his: reading glasses. Large tortoiseshell ones. Perfectly round.
‘No idea.’
‘You’ll never guess.’ Lovable again. I had already made clear I wasn’t going to try. ‘Give up?’
I nodded. Childlike, that was it.
‘Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Precisely.’ He already had Alphonse Karr’s Wikipedia page open on his oversized smartphone and was holding it up for me. ‘Read any of this lot?’ He had scrolled down to a list of all Alphonse Karr’s novels.
• Sous les Tilleuls (1832)
• Une heure trop tard (1833)
• Vendredi soir (1835)
• Le chemin le plus court (1836)
• Geneviève (1838)
• Voyage autour de mon jardin (1845)
• Feu Bressier (1848)
• Fort en thème (1853)
• Les Soirées de Sainte-Adresse (1853)
• Histoires Normandes (1855)
• Au bord de la mer (1860)
• Une poignée de vérités (1866)
• Livre de bord (1879–80)
‘Nope.’
‘You and the rest of the world. But just look at this …’ He scrolled back up the page. ‘Alphonse Karr founded a journal, he was an expert on floriculture and had a number of plants, notably dahlias and a species of bamboo, named after him, and he was “devoted” to fishing. And he lived in Nice and died in Saint-Raphaël. So, although he’s only remembered for one epigram – and by that, I mean the epigram is remembered rather than him – we shouldn’t feel sorry for old Jean-Baptiste.’
I enjoy it, I’ll admit: Max’s fame, that is. I wouldn’t want to be in his place, but I like being a satellite to the star. Orbiting Planet Max is not unlike standing behind the world leaders when an accord is signed. One fantasises for a moment that people are thinking: who is that? He looks important. I bet he’s the one who did all the work and should really be taking the plaudits – only to realise that no one is thinking in this way; that I don’t think in this w
ay in equivalent circumstances – and that this thought is a relief. Really, it is. Proximity to the big guy is enough. A vicarious, big I-am.
He intuits all this, your brother, and this prompts him, semi-mischievously (I’m only semi-reluctant, after all), to drag me into the spotlight from time to time. He was at it at the launch party that evening.
‘Here’s the really important member of the family,’ he said, introducing me to somebody who had no interest in meeting me, however important I was, which they doubted quite frankly, but who had to put up with it because Max was doing the introducing, and being with Max, being seen with Max, was why they were here, as Max well knew, so put up with it they jolly well would. ‘I’m the hellraiser in the family,’ he continued, ‘while Ed here is the peace-maker.’
As you can imagine, Max was especially delighted with this formulation of his. He trotted it out repeatedly as the evening wore on.
‘Sandrine, ducky, darling! Sandrine, this is my brother-in-law, Ed.’ Sandrine – whoever she might have been: a buyer, a dealer, another artist, someone well known in this world, someone who, unlike me, palpably belonged in this world – extended a hand limply. ‘I’m the hellraiser in our family, while Ed here is the peace-maker.’ A titter from Sandrine or whoever. A polite enquiry of me as to what exactly it was I did do. Great relief when I brushed it aside. Even greater relief when I turned the conversation back to Max. ‘And anyway, let’s not let Max deflect attention on his big day. Underneath it all, he’s cripplingly shy, you know.’ A guffaw this time. My best moment. The thank you, thank yous that were going through the minds of the Sandrines at this point were almost visible on their lips. There they were thinking that they were going to be trapped with the bore of a brother-in-law for twenty minutes, only for the brother-in-law to save them from that fate – which made me somewhat less of a bore, perhaps, though they were not going to allow themselves to be caught out in this way. I understood why they really couldn’t be expected to take any interest in me – not tonight anyway? their eyes said. Certainly, mine replied. Eyes being eloquent again.
‘The problem with Ed, Sandrine,’ Max said, determined to be obtuse, ‘is that he is too self-effacing for his own good.’
A look of alarm on the face of the Sandrine once more. We had dealt with this, hadn’t we? Nobody wanted to discuss me; not even I wanted to discuss me, didn’t Max get that?
I helped out by laughing. A thought had occurred – a rather neat one, if I say so myself. Self-effacing I might be, but not too self-effacing, surely. For, in truth, being self-effacing is the main thing, perhaps the only thing, I am good at. People often ask me … Let me rephrase that: I am occasionally asked … what is it exactly that I do? And on such occasions, they, the people asking me, are not asking, Sandrine-style, out of bare-minimum politeness; these people know I am a peace negotiator and are genuinely interested to find out what that entails. (There are such people.) And yet my answer generally takes the form of a self-effacing remark. ‘As little as possible’, for instance. Or ‘Listen. Try to keep the show on the road. A prompt here, a prod there.’ Something of this sort. There is a certain flippancy about these remarks, for sure, but at the same time an essential truth. For, to a large extent, the art, the skill, the trick, in peace negotiations is to make it seem as if the deal is all the work of the two warring parties, that they have negotiated themselves to a settlement without any external intervention. What I am good at then – I realise I am making much the same point more or less – is getting something done without apparently having done anything very much. And while they don’t present prizes for such work, there would be no prizes without it. I’ve sat in the front seats at the Rådhuset in Oslo, after all. Been mentioned by name on the White House lawn. Which is quite a proud boast, and risks undoing all of the above, which is why I would never say any of this to anyone – other than you, that is. Self-effacing for my own good, you see.
Meanwhile the Sandrine had, apparently successfully, moved the conversation on to a different subject, though it was also apparent that she/he/they were far from retaining Max’s full attention, as all the while he, not to be denied his fun, was hunting the crowd with hungry eyes for his next victim … Aha!
‘Günter! Günter, you absurd cunt. Günter, now you know I’m a bit of a hellraiser, well, here …’
A word about the space. Having exhausted the possibilities of housing art galleries in disused power stations or piano factories or synagogues or abattoirs, this one was housed in a disused art gallery. And before you say it, no, that doesn’t just mean an old gallery refurbished and reopened as a new one. Or not quite. For the original gallery, in its derelict state, had apparently been left untouched, though that ‘apparently’ is an important caveat. In fact, the dereliction had been carefully maintained, even added to and touched up somewhat. For instance, by hanging artfully vandalised paintings (defaced with graffiti, the frames broken; that sort of thing) on the damp-streaked, bubbled and blistered walls, and repositioning a smashed-up ornamental fountain so that the snow coming through a broken skylight collected in it. There was no heating in the building, I should add, and lighting was provided by flaming torches. There were vats of glühwein and a boar roasting on a spit. Max’s greatcoat and scarf and cap – with added earmuffs – were perfect for the setting. Most of the women were in furs. Fun furs, funky furs, though I’m sure I got a whiff of fox and mink too. I was both underdressed for warmth and overdressed for smartness.
I won’t try to describe the work Max was displaying. I know I’m Jim in the song: the only one in step, not just among the guests at launch parties, but among the public too. All I will say is that Max’s real genius, in my view (I know, you’ve heard this a hundred times), is that he gets away with it. Still. Through sheer force of personality – that winning, generous, lovable personality; the truly great thing about him.
To give Max his due, he makes no claims at all as to the meaning, the point or the merit of his work. It is what it is, is his consistent – his smart – response to any requests for elucidation. I suspect – okay, I know – he suspects (or knows) what I think of it and so his generosity towards my work is the greater still. And my own supposed humility has a rather tinny ring to it. In the self-importance stakes I am the winner of the paper crown. After all, which of the two of us has five one-man shows running in four continents at the same time; which of us is being followed around by a TV documentary crew?
To return to the Operzimmer: it was, as I had suspected, just Max and I at our big table. And apropos of the documentary, the director didn’t think Max having lunch with his brother-in-law was worth filming. ‘A welcome break,’ Max explained with a laugh when, his having told me about the film, I noted the absence of the crew. ‘It’s been getting so I’m sitting on the pot, mid-dump, I look up, and the cameras are rolling.’
See, self-deprecation and ‘I’m a celebrity’ rolled up in one little phrase.
But the whole hellraiser/peace-maker number was performed for the cameras at the launch party, along with Max doing that affectionate headlock and hair-messing routine on me. I emerged from it red in the face and hair sticking up, looking like a fool. I hate it when he does this to me, but I dutifully played along, smiled gamely, essayed a friendly punch in the stomach that failed to land in every sense. Not to play the game makes you look a bigger fool. As would saying you would rather not be filmed at all, thank you very much.
Not that I was inclined to. For I am part of Max’s story – a not-uninteresting sidebar, with that added element of ‘who-would-ever-have-guessed-those-two-were-related’. I know that people like that Max and I are such contrasting characters, so I did the interview ‘in character’, as it were – the plodding diplomat rather bemused by his charismatic artist brother-in-law. I have no illusions as to how little I will feature in the eventual film. The only purpose I will serve is as a bridge to the heart of Max’s story: the episode in which his sister was brutally murdered. Max will have talked at some le
ngth about the attack, about his struggle to cope with the loss. But he will have not made it all about him; he will have tried to turn it back to you – your brilliant career cut short. I will get a mention too. My grief. My loss. And Max’s display of grief will be heartfelt. Without setting out to, he will emerge well from the episode, I have no doubt. Viewers will see a more vulnerable side to him and his popularity will grow even greater. Though on his beloved social media there will also be a backlash – people accusing him of exploiting personal tragedy to enhance his celebrity. He will show dignity and restraint in the face of these accusations; win more plaudits; attract more opprobrium. He can’t win and he will win. This is the way of things, these days. I know it from my own much lower-wattage experience. Max is a master of art.
Does he keep up such a punishing schedule to fill the hole left by your death? There is something in that. The two of you – so very different in many ways – were always close. He was devastated by your death. The weight of him, a heaving sea on my shoulder, will stay with me for ever. That said, he always did drive himself hard. You don’t get where he has got to unless you do. Still, five shows over four continents and all the rest … He looked shattered at times over lunch; the times when he wasn’t putting on a public performance – and most of the time he wasn’t. Indeed, I did most of the talking. He listened quietly, intently – sometimes distantly. Almost nodding off now and then, but otherwise giving every impression that he was interested in the progress of the talks, the wider geopolitical considerations, the people in my team, and all the other things I had been dying to tell someone about. It is touching, I thought with real warmth, that he always finds time for me when I call or email to suggest we meet up. Which I do sparingly, I should add, knowing the demands on his time.
I am in Austria, I had told him. Chairing talks in a mountain resort.
‘Yes, you did tell me …’
But I was due some leave, and I saw that his one-man was opening, and I was planning to come to Berlin anyway at some stage, and so I was wondering …
