The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  Praise for Easter

  ‘Arditti’s masterpiece and one of the first important English novels of the century’ – Literary Review

  ‘A technically impressive, emotionally moving and deeply disturbing chronicle of death and resurrection. A profoundly passionate and religious novel’ – Independent on Sunday

  ‘Bleakly comic dissection of sex and death at the heart of the Church of England’ – The Sunday Times

  ‘A narrative that is shocking as well as amusing from a novelist whose work continues to entertain and impress. Easter should be essential reading’ – Express

  ‘A portrait of the modern Church of England, with all its complexities, which explores big philosophical questions about the nature of faith, Church and God and the meaning of suffering’ – Independent

  ‘A very bold book. It is a wonderfully funny read and has thought-provoking passages which should challenge a lot of certainties’ – Sara Maitland, Daily Mail

  ‘Arditti’s dialogue and imagery are memorable and his eye for the quirks of Anglo-Catholicism recalls Barbara Pym at her best’ – Daily Telegraph

  ‘A curious and interesting mixture of comic fantasy and serious intent. Arditti is thrilled by the possibility of the intellect, by the opportunities for goodness that exist in everyday life, and excited by the possible freedoms that are enjoyed by the boldest of hearts’ – The Times

  ‘Easter is a masterpiece’ – Time Out

  THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

  Michael Arditti

  For the Lemonia Three:

  Amanda Craig, Liz Jensen and Marika Cobbold

  ‘The best is the enemy of the good.’

  Voltaire

  ‘Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one wants to change himself.’

  Leo Tolstoy

  ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

  Pascal

  ‘De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble

  To read in de Bible –

  It ain’t necessarily so.’

  Ira Gershwin

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: CLEMENT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  2: SUSANNAH

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  3: MARTA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  4: CLEMENT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  CLEMENT

  1

  Clement wondered whether, as a Muslim, Rafik would object to removing his pants. His willingness to work in a bar proved that he was not devout, but nudity might be a taboo too far.

  ‘I have no shame for my body,’ Rafik said. ‘When Mike speaks to me for your painting, I know what I have to expect.’ The reply, while solving the immediate problem, roused Clement’s suspicions of his boyfriend, who did not usually take such interest in his models, especially when they were sitting for the figure of Christ. No sooner had he announced that he was looking for someone new, however, than Mike had suggested Rafik. At first he had been dubious. His best models were actors or dancers who were trained to submit to a stranger’s gaze. He knew in the instant one entered the studio whether he or she would inspire him: whether they possessed that indispensable quality, not beauty so much as poise, stillness, a way of carrying themselves. Which, in Rafik’s case, was straight from the doorway on to his pad.

  He liked to work from life, preferring the stimulus of a model to a photograph or his own creative memory. Unlike his former teacher who had described his subject as the celebration of the female form, he painted both male and female nudes. He was reluctant to idealise the object of his desires. His concern was with the transcendent, the art behind the artist. At the heart of his creed was the word made flesh; at the heart of his credo was the word made flesh made colour; and, although wary of the presumption, he thought of it as a sacramental act.

  ‘I hope you won’t be cold. I’ve turned up the heating.’

  ‘There is winter in Algeria too.’

  ‘Well then… if you’d like to take off your clothes behind the screen.’ Clement, for whom nudity was an artistic statement but stripping an erotic routine, was eager to show Rafik that he recognised the distinction. Rafik gave him a blank look, on to which he projected all his own inhibitions, as he stood in the centre of the room and shrugged off his shirt.

  Clement explained that he wanted to do a few sketches to assess his suitability. He made very specific demands of his models. Should Rafik fail to meet them, it would be no reflection on his body but simply that its proportions were wrong for the picture. Rafik smiled faintly and stepped out of his pants.

  Unnerved, Clement described his intentions, considering it both courteous and prudent to keep his models informed. His May Day Crucifixion, a radical reinterpretation of the traditional image, had been compromised by a model whose grin looked more like a rush of masochistic pleasure than a smile of solidarity with a suffering world. The new work was to be a Harrowing of Hell, the apocryphal story of Christ’s rescue of Adam, a theme which, while popular in Orthodox art, was relatively rare in the West. He had been invited by the Dean and Chapter of Roxborough Cathedral to submit a design for the great East window. It was set above a dull sixteenth-century altarpiece of the Crucifixion, which it would need at once to complement and transform. The obvious subject would have been a Resurrection, but he had opted for a Harrowing of Hell: not the Hell that the Church taught so much as the Hell that it had created. To which end, it was to be overseen by three clerics: an Anglican bishop; a Catholic cardinal and a Presbyterian minister. He had yet to discuss them in detail with the Dean.

  Gazing at the taut perfection of Rafik’s body, the slight frame, satiny olive skin with the thin line of hair running from the cleft of his chest to his pubis, and the disturbing trace of a bruise on his upper thigh, he knew that he had found his model. He picked up his pencil and began to sketch. The question, as ever, was how to put God in the picture. He envied Buddhists, who could express their faith in the abstract and call it Meditation. His was a harder task. As a Christian, he lived in a material world which was also a world of spirit and symbol. As an artist, it was his constant endeavour to recreate the reality that would allow the spirit and symbol to breathe. He had begun to feel, however, that the attempt was doomed. How could people who knew only the bare bones of the Christian story respond to his iconography: the juxtaposition of a clothed Adam, whose body filled him with shame, and a naked Christ, who was literally shameless; let alone his use of the same model for both? Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat had baffled a public unable to make the link between Christ and a barnyard animal. The confusion would be all the greater in an age when The Light of the World was nothing but waves and particles and the Agnus Dei no more than the Sunday roast.

  ‘Am I right in thinking that Adam is a prophet in Islam?’

  ‘He is the first prophet.’

  ‘Was he created out of mud?’

  ‘The Quran says to us that Allah makes Adam out of dust from many lands. This is why the children from Adam are so different as many lands: white, red, black and yellow.’

  ‘Th
at’s very beautiful.’

  ‘In the story, yes.’

  ‘All religions are beautiful in the story, as you say. It’s when they’re put into practice that they grow ugly.’ Clement felt a pang at the thought of his father, who had come to the opposite conclusion.

  ‘It also says to us that Allah makes woman out of bone from man.’

  ‘That’s the same for us.’

  ‘The Prophet says that man must be gentle with woman because this bone is very easy to break. But I do not see this to happen today. A friend of me is taking bus in Annaba when she is meeting some holy men. They see that she is wearing paint on lips. “What is this?” they ask friend. “It is nothing,” she say. She puts tongue very fast on lips. “Look, it is gone now.” “You must take it off with this,” they say and they give her cloth.’ He grabbed a rag from the bench. ‘Like this. “It is gone,” she say, but they are angry. When she will not hold cloth, they hold it themselves. Inside is blade from razor and they cut off her lips… Sorry, sorry. You do not wish for your Adam to cry.’

  ‘It’s Christ,’ Clement said, feeling his own eyelids sting. ‘He’s the naked one. And I do wish it. And He’d cry too.’

  After drawing for an hour, he asked Rafik to dress. He confirmed that he wanted to work with him, explaining that he had to present the finished sketches to the Dean and Chapter in early March. So he would need him for occasional sessions over the next six weeks, and then, provided that the design was accepted, every morning for a month. Rafik assured him that he could meet the schedule.

  ‘I must not be at bar until afternoon. In my land I work to become guide for tour people. Rich people who give Rafik big thanks. Here I must wash up dirty glasses. But I am not dead. This is good, no?’

  ‘This is very good, Rafik.’

  ‘When I think of my home and my mother and sisters and I have tears, I think Rafik is in England and I am not dead. This is good.’ Clement was struck that he mentioned only female relatives. ‘Now we have meeting today and this is good too, no?’

  Rafik stepped forward and Clement thought that he was about to kiss him. A tingle of excitement vied with alarm at the breach of his professional code, and he drew sharply away. Rafik seemed not to notice, prowling around the cluttered studio, exuding a proprietorial air which Clement found strangely endearing, examining CDs and journals, picking up paint-smattered pots and flicking brushes over the down on his arm.

  ‘Is there a number where I can reach you?’ Clement asked. ‘In case I need to rearrange sessions.’ Or add more, he thought, on seeing the model so in his element.

  ‘It is best you must ring me in the bar. They are very good persons. They know everything. I live with this man, Desmond. He is kind man. He loves Rafik very much. He loves Rafik too much. You understand, yes?’

  ‘I think so,’ Clement said in increasing bafflement.

  ‘If he knows that I come here – even with my clothes – he kills me. I do not lie. And I think he kills you too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. He is very strong man.’ Rafik’s smile was so sunny that Clement attributed the threat to linguistic confusion. Any attempt to find out more was forestalled by Rafik’s unlicensed rummaging through a stack of near-finished canvases.

  ‘Why must these be here?’

  ‘I still have some work to do on them.’

  ‘So many? It takes how long to make a painting?’

  ‘It all depends. I’ve been working on that one for four years.’

  ‘Four years?’ Clement caught the mixture of envy and awe in the voice of a man who was paid by the hour.

  ‘I know I only have five more minutes work to do on it. The trouble is I’m not sure which five.’

  Fearing that Rafik would regard him as a dilettante, he prised the picture gently from him and placed it back against the wall.

  ‘Each painting you make comes from the Bible, yes?’

  ‘Not each, but a lot of them.’

  ‘But Mike, he say you are his lover. This can never be so in my religion.’

  ‘It’s not always easy in mine. I never planned to specialise. It just came about.’ Lazy journalists liked to suggest that, as a bishop’s son, he had entered the family business. Nothing could have been further from the truth. His father had never sought to influence any of his children. It was pure coincidence that the son of the Anglican Church’s most notorious recent iconoclast was one of its foremost iconographers. At first, he had played down his faith. Art schools might encourage their students to find their own paths, but those leading to Canterbury or Rome were deemed to be off limits. So strict was the prohibition that, years later, when a friend recalled his struggle to come out as gay, Clement swore that it was nothing to coming out as a Christian at the Slade.

  True to tradition, he had been liberated by Paris, where he spent three years after graduation. In his case, however, he was inspired less by the vie de bohème, in which he had already dipped a toe in mid-eighties London, than by encounters with the Gothic, above all the medieval painting and sculpture in the Musée Cluny. He filled sketchbooks with transcriptions of his favourite pieces, insisting that he was simply studying their techniques in the way that Delacroix and Picasso had studied the Old Masters. His tutor, however, had known otherwise. Aware of his weekly attendance at Mass as well as his passion for Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, he claimed that there was a vital element missing from Clement’s work and that he would never fulfil his promise until he acknowledged it. Clement was furious, accusing him of wanting to banish him to an artistic backwater. He returned to England, intent on critical acceptance and convinced that he had the perfect subject matter in his sexuality.

  Depictions of carnal excess, whether on paper or in mixed media, brought him no more satisfaction than the activities themselves. Then a family friend introduced him to her aunt, who planned to publish her own translation of the Book of Ruth and was looking for an illustrator. Although initially nonplussed, since the friend had failed to warn him that her aunt was a paraplegic who spoke through a voice synthesizer, he came to find her a great inspiration, as uncompromising in her art as in her person. He spent three months making forty lithographs, of which she rejected twenty, and then a further year painting a series of oils based on the prints. The subsequent show in the cloisters of St Mary Abbots changed his life. Not only was it enthusiastically reviewed and sold out within days of opening, but he was taken on by the Albemarle Gallery which had represented him ever since. While he continued to paint both portraits and landscapes, it was his religious work for which he remained best known and of which he was most proud.

  He gave Rafik twenty pounds, overruling his protests that ‘I come here for nothing. This is to see if we are good, no?’, and arranged for him to return the following morning. After showing him out, he made a desultory attempt to clear up, leaving the half-full mugs to fester in the sink with a nonchalance that he would never have shown at home. He double-locked the studio and walked down the corridor, lingering at the doorways of the various painters, potters, sculptors, jewellers and woodcarvers with whom he shared the restored Victorian complex. He longed for someone to come out and chat but respected their work far too much to disturb them. He made his way outside and, wincing at the nip in the winter air, went to unlock his bicycle, from which, for the second time in as many weeks, thieves had removed the lights. He gazed at the denuded frame in silent fury. What was worse, he knew better than to hope for sympathy from Mike who, after the previous theft, had claimed that leaving an expensive bike on the street in Kilburn was asking for trouble.

  A brush with the north London school run increased his frustration. Belsize Road was icy and he wove a tentative path through the line of hatchbacks, frenziedly pinging his bell as a distracted mother pulled out in front of him without indicating. He felt doubly vulnerable, knowing that a cyclist occupied as small a place in her mind as in her mirror. With a sigh of relief he turned off the main road and entered the park, which brought
a measure of protection. Yet, no matter how stressful the journey, he had long dismissed any thought of working at home. He had no desire to convert the conservatory into a studio and so taint his art with domesticity. Travelling to work put him on an equal footing with Mike and his daily struggle to educate the young. He had known from the start that his best strategy with a boyfriend whose puritan conscience was the sole remnant of a nonconformist childhood was to treat his vocation as a job.

  The exigencies of the school timetable meant that he cooked during term-time while Mike took charge in the holidays and at weekends. For all his grumbles about vegetarian cuisine, he was happy to abandon the easel for the gentler demands of the Aga. This evening, he was keen to prepare something special, both to thank Mike for introducing him to Rafik and to atone for his rashness over the bike. So, discarding the overripe avocado, he set about making a broccoli and stilton soup. He was so preoccupied that his first hint of Mike’s arrival was a gentle warmth on the nape of his neck. His body flooded with happiness and he swung round to return the kiss. He felt Mike’s grip tighten in a bid for reassurance more urgent than the usual six o’clock confirmation that there was life after school. He squeezed his waist and waited for him to speak.

  ‘Do we have any wine left over from yesterday?’

  ‘There’s half a bottle of the Sauvignon in the fridge.’

  Mike poured two glasses, downing the first and handing the second to Clement, who took the rush for a refill as his cue.

  ‘Rough day?’

  ‘No more than normal. But there’s a limit to what flesh and blood can stand. Snotty-nosed youths sticking out their scraggy chests, waggling their pimply bums and shouting “I bet you’d like some of this, sir.” Why? “Because you’re a pouf, a fudge-packer, an arse-bandit.” I only wish the rest of their vocabulary was as rich.’