The World According to Bertie (6 page)

14. Artaud's Way Proves to Be an Inspiration

This was something that Matthew knew about. “Antonin Artaud,” he pronounced, “was a French dramaturge.”

Angus Lordie wrinkled his nose. “You mean dramatist?”

Matthew hesitated. He had only recently learned the word
dramaturge
and had been looking for opportunities to use it. He had eventually summoned up the courage to try it on Big Lou, but her espresso machine had hissed at a crucial moment and she had not heard him. And here was Angus making it difficult for him by questioning it. Matthew thought that a dramaturge did something in addition to writing plays, but now he was uncertain exactly what that was. Was a dramaturge a producer as well, or a director, or one of those people who helped other people develop their scripts? Or all of these things at one and the same time?

“Perhaps,” said Matthew. “Anyway…”

“I don't call myself an arturge,” Angus interrupted. “I am an artist. So why call a dramatist a dramaturge?”

Matthew said nothing.

“Simple words are usually better,” Angus continued. “I, for one, like to say
now
rather than
at this time
, which is what one hears on aeroplanes. They say: ‘At this time we are commencing our landing.' What a pompous waste of breath. Why not say: ‘We are now starting to land'?”

Matthew nodded, joined in the condemnation of aero-speak. At least this took the heat off his use of dramaturge.

“And here's another thing,” said Angus Lordie. “Have you noticed how when so many people speak these days they run all their words together–they don't enunciate properly? Have you noticed that? Try to understand what is said over the public address system at Stansted Airport and see how far you get. Just try.”

“Estuary English,” said Matthew.

“Ghastly English,” said Angus. He mused for a moment, and then: “But who is this Artaud?”

“A dram…” Matthew stopped himself, just in time. “A dramatist. He was very popular in the thirties and forties. Anyway, he painted monochrome canvases and gave them remarkable titles. It was a witty comment on artistic fashion.”

This interested Angus. “Such as?”

Matthew smiled. “He came up with a totally white painting–just white–and he called it
Anaemic Virgins on Their Way to Their First Communion in a Snowstorm
.”

Angus burst out laughing. There were white canvases in the public collections in Scotland. A suitable title, he thought.

“And then,” Matthew went on, “he painted a completely red canvas which he called
Apoplectic Cardinals Picking Tomatoes by the Red Sea
.”

Angus clapped his hands together. “Wonderful!” he said. “Now let me think. What would we call a canvas that was simply blue?”

Matthew thought for a moment. “
Depression at Sea
?”

“Not bad,” said Angus. “A bit short, perhaps? What about
A Depressed Conservative at a Risqué Film Convention
?”

“Except that people don't use the term ‘blue film' anymore.”

“But we do talk about turning the air blue,” said Angus. “One turns the air blue with bad language. So how about
A Sailor at Sea, Swearing
?”

“Maybe,” said Matthew. “And green? A completely green canvas?”

It did not take Angus long. “
An Envious Conservationist Sitting on the Grass
,” he said. And then he added:
Reading
Our Man in Havana.”

Matthew looked blank for a moment, but then he laughed. “Very clever,” he said. He was about to add something, but then he remembered how the conversation had started. “That canvas of yours,” he said. “I could sell it for you. Just sign it, and I'll sell it.”

Angus looked puzzled. “But I haven't begun…” he said.

“It's plain white,” said Matthew. “Just sign it. I'll put a title on it, and we could see if I could sell it. We could follow our late friend, Monsieur Artaud.”

Angus was scornful. “A waste of a perfectly good primed canvas,” he said. “We don't have a sufficient body of pretentious people…”

Matthew interrupted him. “But we do!” he said forcefully. “Edinburgh is full of pretentious people. There are bags and bags of them. They walk down Dundas Street. All the time.”

At this, they both looked out onto Dundas Street. There were few people about, but just at that moment they saw a man whom they both recognised. Matthew and Angus exchanged glances, and smiled.

“Perhaps,” said Angus.

“Exactly,” said Matthew, producing a small tube of black acrylic paint from a drawer. “Now, where do you want to sign it?”

Once Angus had inscribed his signature, Matthew raised the issue of the painting's title. He held the white canvas up and invited Angus to suggest something.

“It looks very restful,” Angus mused. “Something like
Resolution
might be a good title for it. Or perhaps
The Colour of Silence
?”

“Is silence white?” asked Matthew. “What about
White Noise
?”

Angus thought that was a possibility, but was just not quite right. Then it occurred to him. “
Piece Be With You
,” he said.

“Perfect,” said Matthew.

Angus nodded in acknowledgement of the compliment. “The subliminal message of such a title is this,” he said. “Buy this piece. That's what it says. This piece wants to be with you.” He paused. “Of course, we could increase its appeal simply by putting an NFS tag on it–not for sale. That message would fight subconsciously with the encouraging message of the title. And the result would be a very quick sale.”

Matthew reached for one of the sheets of heavy white paper on which he typed labels for his paintings. Inserting this into his manual typewriter, he began to tap on the keys. “Angus Lordie, RSA,” he said and typed. “Born…” He looked at Angus expectantly.

“Oh, nineteen something-or-other,” said Angus airily. “Put: Born, Twentieth Century. That will be sufficient. Or, perhaps,
floruit
MCMLXXX. I was in particularly good form round about then.” For a few moments he looked wistful; MCMLXXX had been such a good year.

Matthew typed as instructed. “And the price?” he asked.

Angus thought for a moment. It did not really matter, he thought, what he asked for the painting, as he did not think it would sell. But it occurred to him that if he was going to expose artistic pretentiousness–and artistic gullibility–he might as well do it convincingly. “Twenty-eight thousand pounds,” he suggested.

Matthew laughed. “Fifty per cent of which will come to me,” he said.

“In that case,” said Angus, “make it thirty-two thousand.”

The price agreed, Matthew stood up and prepared to hang the plain white canvas in a prominent place on the wall facing his desk. Then, after sticking the label and details below it, he stood back and admired the effect.

“I'm tempted to keep it,” he said. “It's so resolved!”

“One of my finest works,” said Angus. “Without a shadow of doubt. One of the best. Flawless.”

15. A Small Sherry and a Hint of Synaesthesia

Since her return from the Malacca Straits, Domenica Macdonald had not seen a great deal of her friend Antonia Collie to whom she had lent her flat in Scotland Street during her absence. It had been a satisfactory arrangement from both points of view: Domenica had had somebody to water her plants and forward her mail, while Antonia had been afforded a base from which to pursue her researches into the lives of the early Scottish saints. These saints, both elusive and somewhat shadowy, were the characters in the novel on which she was working, and even if they had failed to leave many material traces of their presence, there were manuscripts and books in the National Library of Scotland which spoke of their trajectory through those dark years.

Domenica's return came too early for Antonia. She had become accustomed to her life in Scotland Street and to the comfortable routine she had established there. She had no desire to return to Fife, to the parental house in St Andrews, where she had set up home after the collapse of her marriage to a philandering farmer husband; not that he had been a philanderer on any great scale–unfaithfulness with one other woman was hardly philandering, even if that woman was exactly the sort an echt philanderer would choose.

If she could not return to Fife, then Antonia would have to find somewhere else to live in Edinburgh. She would not have far to go–three yards, in fact–as the flat opposite Domenica's, and on the same landing, came up for rent at exactly the right time. It was the flat previously occupied by Pat, and the one which had been sold by Bruce when he left for London. Its coming on to the market at just the right time amounted to particularly good fortune, Antonia thought, and indeed there was to be more.

Within six weeks of her signing the lease, the owner asked Antonia if she was interested in buying it. Of course she was able to reply that the difficulty with this was that the flat already had a sitting tenant–herself–and this would require a reduction in the price. The owner had been annoyed by this claim, which seemed flawed in some indefinable way, but, wanting to make a quick sale, had agreed to take £10,000 off the price. Antonia agreed, and the flat became hers. Domenica, though, was hesitant. She was half-hearted in the welcome of her old friend: such friends are all very well–in their place–which is not necessarily on one's doorstep.

In the early stages of their being neighbours, Domenica had decided that she would not encourage Antonia too much. There had been an invitation to a welcoming drink, but this drink had consisted of a carefully measured glass in which the sherry had occupied only two-thirds of the glass, which was a small glass at that. Anything more than this, she decided, might have sent the wrong signal. Antonia had noticed. She had looked at the sherry glass and held it up to the light briefly, as if searching for the liquid, and then had glanced at Domenica to see if the gesture had registered. It had, and both decided that they understood one another perfectly.

“I know that you were about to offer me another sherry,” Antonia said about fifteen minutes later. “But I really mustn't stay. I have so much to do, you know. The days seem to fly past now, and I find that I have to struggle to fit everything in.”

Domenica felt slightly embarrassed. After all, Antonia had shown no signs of living in her pocket, and perhaps it was rather unfriendly to make one's concerns quite so obvious at this stage.

“You don't have to dash,” she said. “I could rustle something up for dinner…”

“Very kind,” said Antonia. “But I've made my own arrangements. You must come and have a meal with me some time soon. Next month perhaps.”

There was an awkward silence. Next week would have been courteous; next month made her meaning crystal clear. And perhaps had added the belt to the braces.

“That would be very nice,” said Domenica. “No doubt we shall see one another before then. On the stairs maybe.”

“Yes,” said Antonia. “On the stairs.”

Over the next few days, they did not see one another at all. It had been an awkward way of establishing the rules of good neighbourliness, but it had worked, and after a while Antonia found herself able to knock on Domenica's door and invite her in for coffee. The invitation had been accepted–after only a moment's reflection on what the diary for that day might contain. That content was nonexistent, of course, but one should only accept an invitation immediately if one is happy for the person issuing the invitation to conclude that one had nothing better, or indeed nothing at all, to do. And Domenica certainly did not want Antonia to reach that conclusion. She was sensitive to the fact that Antonia was writing a book, and therefore had a major project, while she did not. There was a very significant division, Domenica believed, between those who were writing a book at any time, and those who were not; a division just as significant as that between those actors who were currently on the stage and those, the majority, who were resting. For this reason, there were many people who claimed to be writing a book, even if this was not really the case. Indeed, somewhere at the back of her mind she remembered reading of a literary prize for such unwritten books, and of how the merits of those works on the shortlist for this prize were hotly debated by those who claimed to know what these unwritten books were all about.

“What are you going to do with this flat?” asked Domenica as she watched Antonia pour boiling water into the cafetière. It was the wrong question to ask somebody who had just moved into a new flat, but Domenica realised that only after she had asked it. It implied that the new place needed alteration, which, of course, may not have been the view of the new owner.

But Antonia was not offended. “A great deal,” she said, stirring the coffee grounds into the water. She sniffed at the aroma. “What a lovely smell. Coffee. Certain new clothes. Lavender tucked under the pillowcase. All those smells.”

Domenica nodded. “Do you see smells as colours?” she asked. “Or sounds as colours?”

“Synaesthesia,” said Antonia. “My father's one, actually. A synaesthetic.”