Leslie Beck came to see me the other day. He was carrying an oil painting under his right arm. In the past, his arms had always seemed too short for his body, but now he’d had to stretch the right one to contain the painting, and the left was keeping it company, so today he looked not wider than he was long, like a rugger player, but too attenuated for his own good, like the kind of basketball player who gets goals just by reaching over everyone else’s head and dropping the ball through the hoop. Whereupon everyone cheers and shouts, though personally I can never see there’s any merit in merely being taller than anyone else. Or perhaps Leslie Beck had just got thinner, and I had shrunk as well. At any rate, our relative sizes had altered, one way or another, in my favor.
Leslie Beck had never, it seemed to me, been quite tall enough for his wives: first Jocelyn, then Anita. Marriage is easier when the man is noticeably taller than the woman: it makes the balance of power, usually in the man’s favor, seem a more natural state of affairs. Then there is less resentment against the male assumption of superiority. I am not married, so am in a position to notice these things without great pangs of anxiety and fear. In actual terms, Leslie Beck had once been five foot ten and was now coming in at about five foot eight. Two inches can make a lot of difference.
Leslie Beck, I realized, must be pushing sixty. Perhaps his true nature was showing through, as natures in the end do; and I found I wasn’t liking it. For though Leslie Beck’s red hair seemed crinkly and plentiful, it occurred to me now that it was quite likely not hair at all but a rather expensive wig; and though his step was jaunty, I wondered if it might not drag the minute he was round the corner, and though he seemed to carry the painting without effort, it might have needed a pause and a couple of deep breaths before he pushed open the door to achieve that effect. In fact, I found I’d gone right off Leslie Beck, for no fair reason. Sixty happens to everyone, sooner or later. That is, if he’s lucky.
“Hi, little Marion,” he said.
“Why, hello, Leslie,” I said. “What’s that you have under your arm?”
“A painting by Anita,” he said. “I thought you might be interested.”
And Leslie Beck laid the painting, which was done on a proper, expensive, prestretched canvas, five feet by four feet, on the big desk which I keep clear for just such eventualities, and unwrapped it. Swathes of polystyrene bubble wrap fell to the floor and lay about like sheets of cracked ice subjected to unnatural forces. Leslie Beck was taking good care of this painting.
“How is Anita?” I asked. He paused. He looked at me. His eyes were still blue, though rather paler and more watery than once they had been. Now tears came into them.
“I’m being very brave,” he said, “but she’s dead.”
And I looked around the gallery, the Marion Loos Gallery, just off Bond Street, my pride, my achievement, my family, the source of my income (such as it was, the country being in recession) and my security (such as it could be, with tides of violence and unrest lapping at our doorstep), and I was glad I had placed my trust in material objects and not in human beings. But the sun chose that moment to come out from behind a cloud and shine directly in through the plate-glass windows; and the paintings currently on exhibition, by a certain Scottish artist, William MacIntyre, which should have responded to the sudden light, at least in theory, by flinging back their own innate energy, matching solar power with human vision, failed to do so and just looked dull and as if no one were ever going to buy them, or could reasonably be expected so to do. I could see dust motes floating in the air and smell the exhaust fumes of the city traffic which had seeped into the gallery along with Leslie Beck. Nevertheless, appearing at that moment, the sun struck some kind of light right into my head and made me feel quite dizzy—not, I think, with grief for Anita, but with the revelation of some powerful allied emotion. Perhaps it was just dislike of Leslie Beck.
“I thought you’d know,” he added. As if everyone would be familiar with the details of his life and times. He, Leslie Beck.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Next time you have a group show,” he said, “perhaps you’d hang it. What do you think?”
But I was not, for once, looking at the painting for “good” or “bad,” or anything except its narrative. It was an interior; its subject was Leslie and Anita Beck’s bedroom, which I remembered well, from the time she’d been off somewhere. Where had it been? Visiting children or ill parents—the likeliest thing. Some episode, anyway, in the kind of discursive family life other people have, but not me, never did have, nor, I imagine, ever will. I have cats, and they suit me very well.
“It is an unbearable tragedy,” he said. “Just when Anita had finally discovered her talent.”
“Quite so,” I said.
“I thought in the six- or seven-thousand range,” he said.
Aphra came toward us, so I didn’t bother to say “You’re joking.” Aphra was hopping.
“Why, hello,” said Leslie Beck appreciatively, the way men often do when Aphra appears. Aphra is twenty-four and has a great deal of dark brown frizzy hair which springs energetically from a perfect forehead and coils messily down over hunched and narrow shoulders. Her nose is too large and her mouth too narrow, but her skirts are very short and her energy level high, and no one seems to worry about details of feature, least of all Aphra. She was wearing black-and-white-striped tights, the stripes going down the leg, not round. Though from time to time I beg her to dress more calmly, so as not to offer competition to the paintings on the wall, she never will. Aphra bent down to rub her toe, which she had badly stubbed, and she folded her body easily in the middle, and Leslie Beck noticed that, too. Another age, another time, another place, he would have whistled.
“That’s a nice painting,” said Aphra. She had done a night-school class in fine art and felt entitled to pass opinions, though I asked her not to. It was true, though I wished it were not, that the paintings she liked most were the ones which sold first.
“My wife painted it,” said Leslie Beck. “It’s a study of our bedroom. It was on my suggestion that she started painting. She needed something for herself. You know what it’s like for women. She’d never have started if I hadn’t encouraged her.”
“Well,” said Aphra, “she certainly seemed to like your bedroom,” and she hopped and limped on to do, or so I hoped, the mail.
And then Barbara came out of the stockroom, and Leslie Beck said, “Well, hello,” in the tone of a middle-aged roué, and certainly not an elderly widower. Of my two assistants, Aphra, being in her twenties, was a less practical proposition than Barbara, or so Leslie Beck seemed to deduce. Barbara had a degree in fine art and a librarian husband and a small child, and the kind of gentle, puzzled look young mothers who have recently acquired this status tend to have. She was not too beautiful, not too young, and looked as if she were just waiting for someone to explain things and make her happy.
“Hello,” replied Barbara, courteously and formally, and passed on.
“You know how to pick your staff,” observed Leslie Beck, and I returned my attention to the painting. The same cream curtains, the same white cotton bedspread—but the good, expensive things do, of course, last. The wallpaper was striped. I had remembered it as floral: that, at least, had changed. I remembered the pleasure Leslie Beck had given me on top of the white bedspread, there being no time for us to open up the bed, and I remembered my envy of the softness of Anita Beck’s pillows; but the memory was diffused, as if another person had inhabited the body whose legs spread open, welcoming and willing on another woman’s bed, while Leslie Beck gave and took the amazing pleasure he felt was his to give and take.
Now, the painting was not my cup of tea, as the woman who had painted it had not been, either, she who had ousted Jocelyn and been the subject of Leslie Beck’s complaints: her plainness, her dependency, her laggardliness and general dreariness—those qualities, in fact, I most hoped were least characteristic of myself. The painting was muzzy around the edges, photographic in attempt and achievement in the middle. “Why, look”—I could already hear the words at the opening—“you could almost pick up that comb and use it!” Well, I didn’t want that kind of work on my walls, even in a corner badly lit in a group show: I had my pride; I did not want to make so easy a living. Such paintings sell well in the middle market, in the middle price range, but there’s no fun, no risk, no outrage in thus playing safe. You could die of boredom—or, alternatively, promote Barbara to manager and just go home and wait for the source of income to dry up. As for the comb itself, old-fashioned and silver-backed, Anita Beck had simply failed to perceive what was invested in it, and I felt she should have. That was what painters were for. I had picked up that comb in my time, pulled it through my hair. Leslie Beck and my own urgencies had tangled it, both moving my head this way, that way, in and out of Anita Beck’s soft square feather pillows. I’d needed a comb. Myself and who else: we had used the comb and then, no doubt, picked our hairs out of it, not so much out of concern for Anita, the second wife, as to save Leslie Beck embarrassment.
“It’s not quite my style, Leslie,” I said. “Not quite the gallery’s style.”
“Then that’s a pity,” he said. “I did think, since you were such a help to her in the past, and she was so fond of you, I’d give you the opportunity of first option.”
“You’re thinking of Jocelyn,” I said, “not Anita,” and it seemed to me he had to pause a little before remembering who Jocelyn was.
“Well,” he said, dismissing all that, “you’ll be interested to know Anita built up quite a collection of paintings over the last couple of years. You must come round and see them. She developed cancer of the liver. From diagnosis to death in three months. It was in her family. Her mother died of it. Dreadful. Anita painted mostly interiors, but a few landscapes. I was little by little widening her scope. Getting her out of the house.”
“Poor Anita,” I said.
“She had this amazing sensitivity,” Leslie Beck said. “This response, this special talent. But very little self-confidence, left to her own devices. I like to think I helped her. Of course, I won’t release all the paintings at once. I know the art market like the back of my hand. She’s buried next to her mother, in the family vault.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “All very close, as families ought to be.”
I was not portraying myself as either sensitive or responsive, but I need not have worried. I could be as inane as I liked and Leslie Beck wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t remembered Anita as coming from the kind of family that boasted its own burial vault, on the contrary, but I suppose money can buy anything these days, even its own family history. Though “vault” might just mean the same shelf in the mortuary.
“I’ll leave Anita’s painting with you, anyway,” he said, “to think about. Not one of her very best, but naturally I’m attached to it. Well, I am to all of them.” Then he turned his back on the painting, and on its glinty wrappings still scattered all over the floor, and prepared to leave. More exhaust fumes leaked in as he opened the door, though I realized he could hardly be blamed for that.
He stopped in the entrance and looked back at me. He wore a very good gray suit and a cheerful, youthful tie. His cheeks were pink. He looked to me like a carnivore and a drinking man. I am a vegetarian.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said, “without her. How I’m going to live.” He spoke loudly enough for both Aphra in the stockroom and Barbara in the back gallery—attending to some muddle about the price of a particularly small MacIntyre painting, which a prospective purchaser wanted measured, both with the frame and without, gross and net, as it were—to hear. “Dear little Marion,” he said then, in a meditative fashion, “I think of you a lot, you know.”
If he had not said it, I might have believed he was suffering from some kind of retrospective amnesia and could not be held accountable for what he said or did, or how he insulted his wife’s memory, and I would have forgiven him. Had he forgotten me altogether, it would have been, I suppose, understandable, though not pleasant. But that he should both remember and still see nothing amiss in trying to sell me poor Anita’s painting; and, more, that he had reconstructed the wretched woman’s life to provide himself with a happy marriage; and, yet more, that though in love with his own grief he was so shallowly in love that he could still attempt flirtations with my staff—these things were intolerable.
“And in the end, you did so well for yourself,” he said. “The Marion Loos Gallery! Who’d have thought it! And all from our little spot of enterprise, or do you have a backer? Some nice rich banker?”
“No backer,” I said, “no banker. All my own work. Please shut the door. You’re letting the traffic fumes in. I get asthma.”
“So you do,” he said and smiled, and it almost worked. “I remember. But we had to keep that quiet, didn’t we?” When he smiled he showed his teeth and looked young and mischievous and somehow in command again, as if his view of the world were the right one, the only civilized version around.
“Do you ever wonder?” he asked.
“I never wonder,” I said.
“Some things,” he said, “it’s best to keep quiet about. But I’m sure you’ll see your way to hanging Anita’s painting. Times have been easier, as I’m sure you know.”
His teeth were still regular, pointed and white. Once they’d put me in mind of some small, agreeable, nuzzling animal, or, as he became more imperative, something dangerous, some glossy fox, perhaps, rooting around and above me—a vision which would occasionally change, even in the middle of lovemaking, to one of the fox loose in the henhouse, tearing and slavering, blood and feathers everywhere, and then I’d lose my impetus, as it were, my capacity to be mindless, never my strong point, and have to pretend orgasm. He was easily convinced. And then he’d change sides and meld into the cock surviving the slaughter, straddling the dungheap, preening and crowing, “Clever me, clever me, how happy I am.” What an act of trust sex is: thus to open the henhouse door to the fox, let alone bed down nightly with the cock.
“Anita’s memorial service is on Friday,” said Leslie Beck. “So many people loved her. St. Martin-in-the-Fields. At three o’clock. It would be a really nice gesture if you came. It will be dreadful for me, of course. I’ll probably break down. But the Life Force—well, I think I possess it in great measure. I feel it already,” he said, and spread his hands and looked at them, and I looked at them, too. His long thumbs arched away from his palm, bending and mobile even from the top joint. The memory of it made me all but gasp. He caught my eye. He smiled. And then finally he shut the door and went away.
Aphra had already begun to clear and fold the wrappings which had fallen from the painting. I was grateful for her. And, indeed, for Barbara, who, although she drifted and muddled, knew just what to say to the right client at the right time, and made the saying sound accidental—which I sometimes thought perhaps it was—and thereby genuine. She so disliked saying a disagreeable word about anything, was so eager to see the best in everything, she could scarcely avoid being enthusiastic about even the worst of our paintings—indeed, especially the worst—for fear words of distaste would somehow fly through the ether and upset the artist in his garret: Art, for Barbara, was sacred. Sometimes, all the same, I wanted to shake her. Just because it’s Art, I wished her to understand, doesn’t make it good. Just because it sells, doesn’t make it bad.
“What a creep,” said Aphra, of Leslie Beck. To this man, this creep, Anita had dedicated her life. When you’re with a man, no one tells you he’s a creep; they don’t like to; they think, well, that’s her choice, perhaps ours isn’t up to much, either; how will we ever be sure in this polite world? In other words, as we all know, one woman’s creep is another’s true love, and just as well. I didn’t want to believe Leslie Beck was a creep by any objective standard, for Jocelyn’s and Anita’s sakes, or Rosalie’s, or Susan’s, or Nora’s, or my own.
Barbara had stuck the painting on a chair: she studied it. Aphra joined in.
“It oughtn’t to work,” Barbara said, “but it does. What’s that comb doing? It seems to come out of another painting altogether. Rockwell detail in the middle, Monet magic all around.”
“Monet mush,” said Aphra, who liked to wind Barbara up. “Pity she’s dead. I really like the bit in the middle.”
“There aren’t any hairs in the comb, I suppose?” I asked. I wasn’t going to look too closely. There could have been four that I knew of—one of Anita’s, reddish and limp; one of mine, perhaps, long and dark; one of Rosalie’s, wiry and brown; one of Nora’s, short and fair. And more, how many more? Leslie Beck’s favorite bed was his wife’s. Bloody Anita, always the innocent.
“No,” said Barbara, and she sounded surprised. “No hairs, that I can see.”
My voice had risen. I could hear it; it does when I’m stressed. That’s what surprised Barbara. Creeps came in and out of the gallery all the time. They had a good deal to say and seldom parted with a penny. Nothing unusual.
“Put the painting in the stockroom,” I said, “while I work out what to do,” because I supposed something had to be done, and Aphra picked up the canvas and ran, her black-and-white legs, I suddenly saw, a rather welcome return to living op art; and my desk was clear again, but nothing was the same, or could be: what was done could be forgotten, but not undone. Twenty-three years, and at last I felt guilty.