Francis Bacon in Your Blood

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘The thing is, I suppose I could tell everything, because it would be much better when one’s talking about oneself to tell the whole story rather than just bits of it,’ Francis says, while quickly scanning the two new clients ordering their drinks at the bar. ‘But if I did I’d probably end up with an arm cut off or my eyes put out. It sounds a very vain thing to say but by a series of accidents, they were just accidents, my life has been extraordinary. Much more interesting than my paintings. It’s been a ridiculous life as well, of course.

  ‘But I don’t know how you could ever go about putting those things down, Michael, even in an interview or an article. In a way I suppose writing must have become as difficult as painting. The same complex question of recording, yet undercutting mere anecdote. It would take a Proust to know how to do it. It’s something I could never write myself, naturally. I can’t even write a letter.

  ‘In that sense it would be interesting if you could talk about these gangsters I happened to know, the Krays, because they were really curious. Of course they were dreadful, just killing people off and so on, and it’s a good thing they’ve been put away, but at least they were really different from everybody else. They were prepared to risk everything. One of them was quite mad. The queer one, Ronnie. I would never have known them if this actor I used to see, Stanley Baker, when I was living for a bit in Tangier, hadn’t come round to me one day and said, “Francis, I’ve got these friends over from England and can I bring them round to your place for a drink?” And I said yes of course. So then he turned up with the whole dreadful gang of them. I suppose he thought it was terribly smart to know them. Anyway afterwards one of them, the really nasty one of course, came to me and said, “Francis, I’ve got this friend” – he’d fallen for some Spanish boy – “and I don’t feel I can take him back to the hotel, can I bring him round to your place?” So I said, “Well, as it happens I don’t think hotels here mind about that sort of thing.” But he said he was worried about the impression it might make, though you would think that after cutting all those throats he wouldn’t have cared. Anyway, I had a place with lots of rooms at the time so I said, “If you want to you can bring him here.” Well, he did, and after that I never saw the end of him. Naturally. He always seemed to be there.

  ‘For some strange reason someone told him it was a good thing to buy my paintings. One of their gang actually came round to see me with four hundred pounds in his pocket. I remember that seemed a fortune to me at the time, but as it happened I had nothing to give him. Together the two of them had this incredible power. Of course they’re still very powerful now, even though they’re what’s called behind bars. Because they have these “lieutenants” still under their orders, so they can reach beyond prison, as it were, even now. The mad one, he used to go completely mad, he would just kill anyone, was the more, I know it sounds a terrible thing to say, but he was the more remarkable of the two. The more deeply curious.

  ‘One of the ones who worked for them broke into my studio and stole some paintings once. I suppose he’d been told they were worth a lot of money – the newspapers had printed a story about their selling for colossal sums. Anyway he’d been hanging around the studio for some time. He just wanted money I think, because at night there used to be this tap-tap-tap on the door, the whole time, tap-tap-tap, well it went on and on, and I was too bored by the whole thing to go down and open up to him. I could probably have given him something and he would have gone away. Anyway. It was a great nuisance in the end, because he took some pictures that I terribly didn’t want to let out of the studio because they were very bad. Well, you know how those things are: there was just no trace of them at all. And then about a week later, I had to go and see my framer, you know, Alfred Hecht. And there he was, showing Alfred the pictures.

  ‘He’d just that moment been trying to see whether he could sell them. When I came in he took them and ran out. But that wasn’t the end of it. It never is with that kind of thing. The next day I went back to the studio in the afternoon and I found them all in there, the whole gang of them, just sitting round waiting, and there was that really nasty one saying to me how long it had been and how nice it was to see me again and so on. Of course I didn’t know what to do, so I asked them whether they’d all like a cup of tea. And they said they would, so I made them some and we all sat round and they were terribly polite, and just sat there drinking their tea, but when they got up to go there was no doubt what they meant to tell me. So all I could do was drop the whole thing. A bit later, I did manage to get the pictures back, but I had to pay some ridiculous sum of money to buy them at auction. Well, then I was able to destroy them and have done with it.

  ‘In the end, when the police had enough on them to bring them to trial, one of these lieutenants of theirs came to me and said, “I can’t turn evidence against the twins, can you give me the money just to disappear?” So I gave him the money, and he did disappear. I haven’t heard of him since. But one day he could simply turn up again. That’s the boring thing about people like that. You never know when they’ll turn up again. I have to say that deep down I hated the idea of what they did to people. In a restaurant in Tangier, I once saw them force a man to go down on his knees and kiss their shoes in front of everybody. Well, there it is. For some reason I often seem to come across people like that. I suppose, like John Deakin says, it’s because of what’s called “the company she keeps”.

  ‘I still hear from them now that they’re in prison. They send me these paintings they do there. They’re very odd. They’re always of these kinds of soft landscapes with little cottages in them. The thing is that’s just the kind of life they always wanted. A life of ease in the country.’

  The pub has begun to fill up. Some of the regulars are eyeing us, openly wondering who we are and what we’re doing. Francis has decided to continue the evening at Muriel’s and invites me and Alice to come with him, but I claim that Alice is still recovering from the long drive from Paris and wave goodbye as he gets into a taxi to go back up west.

  My father wants to have what he calls a ‘family conference’, which would include not only me and my sister, but any other relative he can persuade to come to Stocking Pelham, the inaccessible village in Hertfordshire where he and my mother are living out their retirement years. I recoil from the idea but I can’t see how I can not go without creating a major fuss. My mother has told me he’s in the middle of his manic phase and that everything’s been planned, right down to organizing the travel for everyone lucky enough to have been summoned. No one knows why my father has had this idea or what it’s about, but my aunt Yvonne and my uncle Mike, the two siblings of his I get on with best, have already accepted. My mother has also mentioned that my father’s health has not been good and that he’s been to the hospital in Bishop’s Stortford several times for ‘tests’. This worries me and makes me feel obscurely guilty. When the tickets arrive by post, I realize I have no choice, and I call my friend David to make sure he can put me up for a couple of nights in London.

  My father may be a manic depressive, but he’s not clinically mad and he’s very far from being stupid. At University in the mid-1930s he got the top First of his year (compared to my miserable 2:2), and he can marshal facts or solve a crossword with impressive accuracy. But he has just staged one of the weirdest acts I’ve ever come across. There were about a dozen of us seated in a ring around the huge armchair he now seems welded to in the living room, with its dispiritingly low, beamed ceiling and smoke-blackened inglenook fireplace. On the tacit but quite unfounded assumption that everyone in the room was bound by a deep sense of family unity, my father spoke without pause for a good three hours, weaving a monologue that went from the stockpot that Nana, his French mother, kept going all year in the Clarges Street kitchen through the anti-Mosleyite street fights in which he and his brothers had been involved to his first major breakdown, triggered by the poverty he had witnessed in Italy immediately after the war, and his present battle with depression (‘I ha
ve seen the signs of it perpetuated in my own children,’ he remarked oracularly, fixing his curiously brown-flecked grey-green eyes on me). Eventually, having gulped down the gin-and-tonics my mother handed around (no mention having been made of my father’s parallel battle with the bottle), we were allowed to leave on the pre-arranged transportation and resume our lives, none of us much the wiser about the reasons why my father had launched into this Lear-like exposition suggesting (as Shakespeare had put it so succinctly but my father had not) that he was more sinned against than sinning.

  I’ve left enough time in London to catch up with some old friends, and I’m really looking forward to it after being exposed to my father’s bizarre monologue. Francis has suggested lunch and we meet at a trattoria that’s opened on Romilly Street. I sense right away that his mood has changed since we were in Narrow Street. I’ve seen these swings in him before (my father’s clearly not the only one) and realize that the best way to deal with them is to stay at a remove and wait till they blow over. We have a mediocre meal, which does nothing to improve Francis’s humour, then start on the clubs. Wherever we go, Francis makes sweeping statements, delivered on hands held out flat and unanswerable, about anything that comes up.

  ‘I hope,’ someone begins.

  ‘There’s no hope,’ Francis counters, ‘because there’s nothing to hope for. We live and we die and that’s it. Can’t you see? When I die, I just want to be put in a body bag and thrown into the gutter.’

  ‘It’s a mug’s game,’ someone else beside the bar says, ‘whether you’re going for the horses or the tables.’

  ‘I don’t go for anything,’ Francis retorts. ‘I can’t think what you’re saying. Can’t you see, you stupid cunt, there’s nothing worth going for?’

  Time seems to have flattened out again into a slowly revolving plane where only the same drinks and the same phrases recur. With no noticeable transition we are sitting in another room now with two women who seem familiar. We may have met at the Colony Room, and I know one of them is the dress designer Thea Porter but I can’t remember which one. I have a vague inkling that the smaller of the two is making a play for me. It amuses me but sagely I put it down to the drink.

  Then I realize we’re in a restaurant, but I’m fairly sure no one else has noticed. Certainly none of us can be hungry.

  Menus are propped up against the decorative Chianti flask in the middle of the table.

  ‘I’ve no idea what I want,’ Francis says flatly.

  ‘There’s Parma ham,’ I venture.

  ‘I hate Parma ham.’

  ‘Or grilled sardines.’

  ‘I loathe sardines. I simply loathe them,’ Francis says with venom. ‘What I’d love really is a boiled egg. Something absolutely simple and delicious. But of course they’re far too grand here to have anything that ordinary. In any case, I doubt we’ll ever get served.’

  ‘Buona sera, signori,’ a waiter says, stepping up briskly.

  ‘I was just wondering whether I could have something absolutely simple like a watercress salad,’ Francis says to him challengingly.

  ‘Water salad?’ the waiter says blankly.

  ‘Watercress,’ Francis repeats. He is wheezing and clearly having trouble breathing. ‘My friend here speaks more languages than exist. I’m sure he knows the Italian for watercress.’

  ‘Cressone,’ I say on the spur of the moment. ‘Una insalata di cressone dell’acqua.’

  ‘Si, si,’ says the waiter whom I’m beginning to suspect is more North African than Italian. ‘Tonight we have not.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we might at least have a little red wine while we’re making up our minds.’

  ‘Subito, signori.’

  ‘He’s exactly like a waiter in a novel,’ the smaller woman suggests.

  ‘The thing is, I hate novels,’ Francis says emphatically.

  ‘Well, there are some,’ the woman says hesitantly. ‘I mean there’s Lowry’s Under the Volcano, for instance.’

  ‘I saw nothing in it,’ Francis says, sweeping his hand flat and hard over the tablecloth. ‘I know all about that life. I don’t have to read novels about it.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean there’s nothing in it,’ I say. I feel I should come to her rescue, and I’m gratified when she shoots me a meaningful look.

  Then I realize Francis is staring at me malevolently.

  ‘It doesn’t go far enough. D’you see? You have to go much further to make a work of art. D’you see? Art’s above all a question of going too far.’

  His face has turned into a frightening white mask of fury.

  The two women nod. Their instant acquiescence irks me.

  ‘I don’t see why you have to exclude all writers and artists except the few you consider great,’ I say, more heatedly than I wanted. ‘There are others whose work has had a tremendous—’

  ‘But what have they invented? Any of them? Just tell me. It’s the same thing in painting. Outside Picasso and Duchamp and to some extent Matisse, who has there been?’

  His eyes bore into mine. No trace of drunkenness remains.

  ‘Who else has there been? No one else has gone far enough. That’s your trouble, Michael. You’ve simply never gone far enough. That’s why you’re stuck in journalism. But then of course I know that journalists write whatever their papers tell them to write. You just write what you’re told to. Deep down, all journalists are skunks, I know that. And rotten. Rotten to the core . . . Oh, look. Now of course he’s deeply offended.’

  I’ve seen this happen to others, and I’ve known that one day it will happen to me. It has, but at a moment when I least expected it. Francis knows exactly how to hurt, and I am touched to the quick. All I know is that I can’t and won’t continue to sit there.

  ‘I know it sounds phoney to say these things,’ the larger woman is saying, ‘but I wanted to tell you how deeply, deeply moved I was by your Paris show.’

  ‘I’m so glad you liked it,’ says Francis mechanically.

  ‘I wonder if you’ll excuse me,’ I butt in, getting to my feet. ‘I’m not feeling at all hungry.’

  Smarting and confused, I make for the door.

  The next morning, coming round in David’s ballroom-cum-bedroom, I ponder Francis’s sudden savagery. He can be the most tolerant person in the world, accepting all kinds of weaknesses and oddities (except religious belief) in other people, but on questions of taste he’s bigoted and unyielding. I’m no particular fan of Malcolm Lowry’s, so I could have let it go. I was probably showing off to the smaller woman. Even so, his strictures are unfair and tiresome, and the reaction was completely out of proportion. Thinking back on it, I still find that taut white mask of fury one of the most frightening things I’ve ever encountered.

  ‘Phone for you,’ says David, coming in fully dressed. I’m always intrigued by the way he puts on coat and tie even when he’s working at home.

  ‘Hallo,’ I say, tentatively. I can’t think who can be calling me here.

  ‘Is that you, Michael?’ Francis says. ‘Listen. I do hope you don’t mind my calling you at David’s. I’ve got to go out to do an interview so I thought I’d call before I left. I’ve got such a hangover that my brain is simply crackling with energy. I can’t think what I’m going to talk about, though.’

  ‘Well, I just hope that you don’t talk the kind of nonsense you were talking last night,’ I say. I want to say ‘the kind of bollocks’, but it doesn’t come out like that.

  There’s a surprised silence on the line.

  ‘The thing is,’ Francis says eventually, ‘I was wondering if by any chance we could meet at the Ritz this evening. Otherwise I won’t see you before you go back to Paris.’

  I relish my instant of power. But I have no doubt what the answer will be.

  ‘Alright,’ I say curtly. ‘But I can’t be there before seven.’

  David has come in to an inheritance. He’s always been better off than me, and very easy and generous with money. One of his passions at the mo
ment is having white suits with bold lapels and flared trousers made by Tommy Nutter in Savile Row and ordering armfuls of flowered shirts in Jermyn Street. I have been a willing accomplice on these expeditions and I’ve picked up a nice Prince of Wales check suit in a sale as well as a couple of understated but unmissable kipper ties. No one can say you’re not wearing a tie with one of these, I think as I prepare to sally forth to the Ritz, carefully wrapping a piece of mauve silk the width of a codpiece round my neck.

  Francis on the other hand, once I’ve found him among the potted palms and gentle Viennese music, is still wearing as ever his loosely knotted black tie. His mood, however, couldn’t be more different from last night’s.

  ‘I’ve just spent the afternoon at one of those little gambling places in Soho where I usually get completely cleared out,’ he announces exultantly as the waiters fuss round us bringing the champagne and dainty little dishes of nuts. ‘But this time I’ve had the most marvellous win.’

  He’s kept his big black leather trenchcoat on, and he starts rummaging around in one of its many pockets and produces a thick wad of banknotes wrapped in cellophane.

  ‘I’ve simply got masses of money,’ Francis says loudly, laughing, and looking round the sedate salon. A couple of the waiters smile back at him, and one of them steps forward to pour a little more champagne.

  With his black leather arms outstretched Francis is trying very theatrically to tear the wad of notes open with his teeth. By now he is the undisputed centre of attention, with all the hotel clients and the waiters following his attempts to get the tight cellophane open.