‘I’m having vodka!’ shouted Connie from the kitchen — I didn’t dare to wonder what the kitchen was like — ‘But there’s no ice. Would you like vodka?’
‘Just a small one,’ I replied. She entered with the drinks and I noticed that she had reapplied lipstick somewhere along the way, and that made my heart sing too.
‘As you can see, the cleaners have just been.’
I took my glass. ‘There’s fresh lime in this.’
‘I know! Sophisticated,’ she said, biting the slice. ‘Club Tropicana.’
‘Are any of these paintings yours?’
‘No, I keep those safely locked away.’
‘I’d love to see something. Your work.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘Where’s Fran?’ She had told me all about Fran, her housemate, who, like all housemates through the ages, was ‘completely mad’.
‘She’s at her boyfriend’s.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘It’s just you and me.’
‘Okay. And how are you feeling?’
‘A little better. I’m sorry for freaking out like that. I shouldn’t have taken that pill, it was a bad idea. But I appreciate you staying with me. I needed … a calming presence.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, now I feel … perfectly fine.’
We smiled. ‘So,’ I said, ‘am I sleeping in Fran’s bed?’
‘Good God, I bloody hope not.’ She took my hand and we kissed again. She tasted of lime and chewing gum. In fact the gum was still in her mouth, which would have thrown me at any other time.
‘Sorry, that is disgusting,’ she laughed, removing it, ‘us kicking that around in there.’
‘Don’t mind,’ I said.
She stuck the gum on the doorframe. I felt her hand on my back, found my hand on her thigh, on top of the dress then beneath it. I stopped to catch my breath. ‘I thought you said nothing was going to happen?’
‘I changed my mind. You changed it for me.’
‘Was it because of the lemon battery thing?’ I said, and she laughed while we kissed. Oh yes, I was quite the wisecracker.
‘My bedroom’s a disaster area,’ she said, breaking away. ‘Literally and figuratively.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said, and followed her upstairs.
Do I sound uncharacteristically suave in all of this? Do I sound aloof, nonchalant? The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way through my rib-cage — not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?
Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed, then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess — critical term — so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.
Such was my understanding of the history of art — its ‘narrative’, I ought to call it — until I met my wife. It is barely more sophisticated now, though I’ve picked up a few things along the way, enough to get by, so that my art appreciation is almost on a par with my French. In the early days of our relationship Connie was quite evangelical and bought me several books, second-hand editions because we were in our happy-but-poor phase. Gombrich’s
