I Could Love You (9 page)

I’m allowed a couple of days to get myself together, aren’t I?

9

Lovelorn Christina drives south down the M23 dreaming of breakfast tables set for young families in suburban semis, of blue-striped china, the red-and-green cockerel on the Kellogg’s Cornflakes packet, the amber glow of a jar of Golden Shred. Joe Nola’s visions of domesticity invade her mind and enchant her heart, even as the Puck-like image of the artist himself dances backwards before her, forever seductive, forever out of reach.

Before her tired eyes a river of car headlights streams north from Gatwick. The day ends too soon, the night lasts too long.

Oh, Joe. I love your dancer’s body, your tactile grace. I love your laughing celebration of this disappointing world. But I mustn’t fall in love with you, Joe, because you are the star of my show. Not appropriate for the filmmaker to fall in love with her subject. That way lies conflict of interest, not to mention heartbreak.

Everyone loves you, Joe. Allow me to take my place in line, concealing my adoration beneath a veneer of professionalism and an easy teasing manner. Though as I have taken care to let slip, I am currently, possibly briefly, available. There is a window of opportunity. I am also currently thirty-one years old and not by any means desperate, not in this age of mature pregnancies.

Her mobile rings as she’s passing Pease Pottage and the blue road signs are giving way to green. She shouldn’t answer while driving but she does. It’s Paul, her series editor.

‘Where the fuck are you?’

‘I’m on my way to meet Anthony Armitage. I want to bring him up to the gallery and catch his reactions to the Joe Nola show.’

‘Who the fuck is Anthony Armitage?’

She can hear him Googling the name even as he asks.

‘He taught Joe way back, in some art school somewhere. He was Joe’s mentor.’

Clickety-click. Tappety-tap.

‘Fuck! He’s eighty!’

‘He hates all modern art. Including Joe’s.’

‘Is that a fact?’ She can almost hear Paul’s brain working, clicking its way to the conclusion she herself reached at lunchtime, which is when Joe told her about the old man.

‘So has he agreed to do it?’

‘Paul, this is a man at war with the modern world. He has no phone, no mobile, no agent, no gallery, no dealer, and no known relations.’

Paul ponders through the digital ether.

‘Better and better.’ He’s still on Google. ‘He’s got two of his portraits in the NPG and one in the Royal Collection.’

‘Sure. He’s good. He’s just way past his sell-by date. Like fifty years past.’

‘And he hates Joe’s work.’

‘So Joe says.’

‘Good girl. Drive on.’

Joe at lunch surrounded by the white-tiled proletarian chic of Livebait in Waterloo, eating high-priced fish and chips, pointing his fork at her, tomato ketchup on his lips, telling her about Anthony Armitage.

‘Ran into him at the RA a few years back. He poked my chest with one finger – jab! jab! – and hissed, “Cancer! Cancer!”’

What do you make of me, Joe? Of course I know you take the trouble to charm me because I’m the best boost your career has had to date, or so you hope. I must be made to love you so that the show applauds you. But what happens after transmission? The screen goes black, the credits roll, and then? We’ve been together so much these last weeks. We’ve had fun, haven’t we? What you don’t know is that in my private life I’m shy. I’m only this brazen and self-assured because my job requires it. Take away the film camera and I shrink into the wallpaper. I am the wallpaper.

Here’s the big question, Joe. Are you gay?

The general assumption is, Come on, guys, what you see is what you get. Is the Pope a Catholic? As it happens Joe’s a Catholic, or at least he was raised in that mother-ridden faith. But there is such a thing as strategic gayness, a calculated addition to the image. Consider the blithely ruthless way he dropped the final consonant of his name: Joe Nola was once Joseph Xavier Nolan from one of the rougher quarters of Dublin. And Lottie, the unit gossip, claims to know two women Joe has slept with, one of whom she swears lived with him for over a year.

Oh shit! Nearly missed the slip road onto the Brighton bypass.

Christina checks the printout showing her route. Past Lewes, take a right at the Edenfield roundabout. Through the village, take a left.

Edenfield is where Henry Broad lives, her one-time boss. Her first job in television, and her first crush.

Christ, I was such a child. What can he have thought of me?

What do you think of me, Joe? Are we mates? You’re not in a relationship right now, gay or straight, not as far as I know, and I know everything about you, so there’s nothing to stop us loving each other except that old hump in the road. Between friendship and love the road rises, and the hump can feel insurmountable. What we need is a burst of speed. Move on to the more volatile emotions. I’m talking about the show, Joe. I want to see you caught off guard. Hurt, angry, open to surprise.

‘He’ll never do it,’ Joe says about Anthony Armitage. ‘He despises television even more than he despises me.’

But it’s worth a shot. For a whole lot of reasons.

Driving through Edenfield now. One of those houses might be where Henry lives. And his wife, and his children, and his dog and his cat and his slippers.

Easy now. No need to be bitchy.

Turn left past the Edenfield Place Hotel. It’s a road for about a hundred metres then it turns into an assault course. Her little Fiat, built for town, lurches like a beer can in a mill race. No human habitation in sight. Can one doubt the all-knowing Google? If so, in what can we trust? All is mere opinion and rumour.

A soft gleam in a window ahead. Christina pulls the trembling Fiat to a stop by a wall: beyond, the black bulk of the house draped in night. One window shines a private shine.

Lamplight. Or candlelight. Six o’clock on a Friday evening but here it’s midnight in the Middle Ages.

She has to knock many times before there comes an answering growl through the closed door.

‘I’m not here.’

‘Mr Armitage? I’m a friend of Joe Nola’s.’

She shouts in case he’s deaf as well as blockaded behind a locked door.

‘Who?’

‘Joe Nola.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘I’ve come down from London to see you.’

No answer.

‘Can I please tell you why?’

No answer.

‘I’m a television journalist. I work for Sky Arts.’ She pauses. The magic of television not working its spell. ‘I might even be young and gorgeous.’

The door opens. Men are simple creatures at heart, even in old age.

He stands in the doorway, the light such as it is behind him, presenting a semi-silhouette of some disarray. His white hair sticks out in odd clumps. He wears a thick-knit jersey from beneath which protrudes the tails of a shirt. He’s staring at Christina with an expression of irritable disappointment.

‘You’re not gorgeous at all,’ he says. ‘You’re not even young.’

‘Oh, come on. I’m not bad.’

He’s eighty, for Christ’s sake. Who does he hang out with? Kate Moss?

‘Joe Nola is a fraud,’ he says, still standing like a sentry in the doorway. ‘His real name is Joe Nolan.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s a circus act. But then, so are they all.’

‘I’m cold. I’m freezing my tits off out here.’

He looks surprised.

‘A potty-mouth,’ he says. ‘And a liar. Lucky for you I was brought up to respect the fair sex.’

He stands back and indicates that she should go into the room to the right of the front door, the room in which the only lamp is lit. There’s a wood fire burning in the small grate.

‘You don’t respect women at all,’ says Christina. ‘You exploit them. Look at
Ariadne, Sleeping
.’ This is one of Armitage’s paintings. ‘She’s not sleeping at all. She’s lying naked on a chaise longue like Manet’s Olympia, peeping out from between her eyelids thinking, A hard man is good to find.’

‘The Manet reference is deliberate.’

‘Just like Manet ripped off Velasquez.’

After this he’s putty in her hands. It’s a technique she’s used many times before: flirtatious, obscene, flatteringly well-informed. Men of middle years and more are bewitched. All’s fair in love and journalism.

‘Sit down, now that you’re here. Sit where you get the warmth of the fire. Tell me your name.’

‘Christina Tennant.’

She gives him her card, heavy with professional integrity. He doesn’t look at it. He looks at her. At a guess she reckons he’s revising his judgement that she’s not gorgeous at all. She’s maybe a little bit gorgeous. Seen in three-quarter profile so her nose doesn’t spoil the effect, and in this extremely flattering lamplight.

All round the wall and stacked on the floor are canvases; there must be over a hundred of them. Most of them seem to be figures: group studies, portraits. Also bottles. This man drinks.

‘So what do you want from me?’ he says.

‘I’m making a television film about Joe. You know his work is part of the new exhibition at the Hayward?’

‘Yes. I do know.’

‘He thinks of you as his mentor.’

‘He’s a presumptuous fool.’

‘So I want you to come up and take a look at his work.’

‘You must be insane.’

‘I’d be fascinated to see, and film, what you make of it.’

He’s breathing heavily now. Sitting in the other armchair before the fire, hands folded over his stomach, legs stretched out.

‘Well, I’ll tell you now what I’ll make of it, Miss Potty-Mouth. I’ll make trash of it. I’ll reduce his trashy work to much smaller pieces of trash. I’ll bring a hammer with me and I’ll smash it into tiny little pieces and sweep it up into black bin-bags and then his adoring public can come and admire it, because they won’t be able to tell the difference.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ says Christina.

‘Oh, it would, would it? I doubt if that cocky little Irish prick would agree with you on that.’

‘I wouldn’t tell him.’

The old man stares at her.

‘You mean you’d let me loose in the Hayward with a hammer and turn a blind eye?’

‘But not a blind camera.’

‘Of course. Slow of me. You want a scandal.’

‘Just because I’m gorgeous doesn’t mean I’m stupid.’

His first smile.

‘Well, well. I’ll be the judge of that.’ He reaches behind his chair and produces a bottle of Scotch and a glass. He fills the glass and proceeds to drink it. ‘Here’s a question for you,’ he says. ‘If you answer it correctly I will consider your proposition. What is your opinion of Joe as an artist?’

‘I think he’s magnificent.’

‘Wrong answer. You have failed the test.’

‘Ah, but have I? A moderately attentive three-year-old could work out that you don’t rate Joe’s work. So why didn’t I tell you what you wanted to hear?’

‘Because you flatter yourself that you have integrity.’

‘Integrity is for the young. I’m over thirty.’

‘Over thirty! My, oh my!’

But he’s enjoying this. The Scotch is mellowing him.

‘You asked me my opinion of Joe as an artist. You didn’t ask me for my definition of artist. You yourself called him a circus act. A high-wire artist. A trapeze artist. A human cannonball. Joe performs magnificently in the three-ring big top that is the art world today.’

Anthony Armitage gazes at Christina for a long silent minute.

‘Not bad,’ he says at last. ‘Nifty footwork. Fancy a snout?’

He holds out his glass. She declines with a gesture of one hand.

‘So you’ll do it?’

‘Smash Joe’s art on camera? I’d be locked up.’

‘Better and better. Middle England would gather in candlelit vigil outside the prison gates.’

‘You are a witch. You are a temptress.’

‘I would deny all knowledge, of course.’

The old man looks into the fire. The flicker of the flames reflects on the lenses of his glasses.

‘My God!’ he says. ‘I could do it.’ He falls silent, brooding. Then: ‘When did you have in mind?’

‘The show closes in five days. How about Monday? That’s always a quiet day for visitors.’

‘Would Joe be there to see?’

‘If you want him to be.’

‘No. Better not. He’d stop me.’

He rises slowly from his chair and raises his glass in a toast.

‘A blow for truth!’ he cries. ‘A blow for sanity! Pinoncelli
redivivus
!’

‘Pinoncelli?’

‘The man who urinated in Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain
, which is, as you know, the
fons et origo
of ready-made art, and an actual urinal. Then he attacked it with a hammer.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘You disappoint me. His act was dismissed as a bid for self-publicity. And naturally the making of art has no truck with any attempts at self-publicity. Oh, the bastards! Oh, the tawdry little hypocrites! What lies they tell. What smug little lies. And the poor deluded public, frightened out of their wits, bullied and bewildered, obedient as sheep. Anything not to be called bourgeois, anything not to be called philistine, off they troop, nodding and grinning, through the halls of shame and nonsense. Oh, madness, madness!’

He clutches at his hair with his free hand and groans aloud. Then he comes to a stop and shoots Christina a sharp interrogative look.

‘Is there money in it?’

‘We can’t exactly pay you to smash Joe’s installation.’

‘How about expenses? Travel, hammer, etc.’

‘Yes, we’d pay your expenses.’

He glowers at her.

‘I’m not greedy. I’m broke. Look at this place. I’m not living here for the view. The roof leaks and there’s no electricity. This crap lamp isn’t for period detail. I’m penniless. Skint. Not funny when you’re eighty, let me tell you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want pity. I want cash.’

Christina reaches into her bag.

‘How about an advance on expenses?’

She holds out five twenty-pound notes. He takes them.

‘This doesn’t mean you’ve bought me.’

‘I know. You cost more than that.’

He grunts in approval.

‘Monday, then,’ she says. ‘I’ll send a car to pick you up at ten.’