CHAPTER SIX

Anthony Keating carefully raised himself on one elbow and stared down at the still-sleeping body of Rebecca Tonks beside him. How beautiful she looked! And how delightful the scent of her soft femininity! He had been celibate for so long, before meeting her, that he had quite forgotten what women smelt like. Not only that; he had quite forgotten what they felt like, too. But Rebecca had made it possible for him to put his celibacy behind him and embrace his sexuality with a sure knowledge. She had made it possible on Thursday and Friday and, with a little coaxing, she would doubtless make it possible for him again today.

He bent down closer to her head and gently inhaled the fragrance of her soft hair. It seemed to him even more delightful at this virginal time of day than during the night, when he had playfully run his fingers through it and delicately buried his nostrils in its silken strands. There was certainly something aphrodisiac about it, something that aroused one's desire. But his desire had been so thoroughly satisfied, the previous evening, that it could only be aroused to the comparatively feeble extent of putting the tip of his tongue to a few strands of hair which he now held in his right hand. He didn't want to be deprived of the taste and texture of her hair simply because of an essay he had read, some time ago, about the existence of ticks, those insect-like bloodsuckers! To him, it was as much a gesture of confidence in her hair as an indication of his growing love for her, the implication being that even if, by some remote chance, her hair did contain ticks, he would still find it no less attractive. For they would be her ticks, after all, and therefore no ordinary ones! On the contrary, they would almost be something special. But why was he thinking about ticks now, about tiny parasites which she had probably never even heard of, let alone contracted. It was really quite absurd.

Letting go of her hair, he gently eased himself back to his former horizontal position by her side and shut his eyes to the wan light filtering in through the pale-green curtains of his bedroom. What a strange dream he had dreamt just before waking up! It was so strange that he couldn't quite remember it, at least not accurately. But there had been a thing about Portsmouth in it - a Portsmouth, however, that existed somewhere near the north-east coast of England! For he had looked at a map, in this dream, and discovered that there was no such place on the south coast. Where one might have expected to find Portsmouth one encountered, instead, a place called Sunderland, which had apparently changed places with it, or almost so, give or take a few miles. But how odd one's dreams could be sometimes! It was as though.... And then he suddenly recalled his experiences at the Merlin Gallery the previous afternoon. Yes, there was definitely a connection of sorts between some of the exhibits on display there and what he had dreamt of during the night! If Alan Connolly hadn't indulged in map surrealism, so to speak, he had certainly indulged in a surrealism of sorts or, more accurately, of the body. Not in the sense that where one expected to find toes one found fingers or, alternatively, legs where one had expected arms. No, Connolly's surrealism had simply applied names to parts of the body to which, in reality, they had not the slightest applicability. For instance, in one of the three large drawings of the nude male on display, one found oneself staring at a foot which had been designated, with the aid of a large red arrow, 'nipple'. Higher up, the component of the body that one ordinarily regarded as the forearm had been similarly designated 'nose'. And where the nose was, one's baffled mind encountered an arrowed designation of 'kneecap'!

Having dealt with the front of the male body in such an unconventional manner, the artist had then proceeded to apply similar principles to the back of it in another drawing, so that, to take a single example, the left buttock bore the noun 'nape' and the right one 'calf muscle'. And in a third drawing, which focused upon internal organs of the body, one found oneself staring at designations such as 'heart' for kidneys, 'lungs' for bladder, and 'appendix' for liver. As Keating had to admit, it was more than a trifle perplexing, particularly in an age when surrealism was no longer quite in vogue! But, on subsequent reflection, it also contained an amusing side which poked fun at conventional conditioning and gave one a short holiday from the everyday world, including, no less importantly, of the current art establishment. And so too, for that matter, did the attendant drawings of the female body, with a slightly different arrangement of names and, following them, the drawings of the various animals, birds, fish, and insects which the artist had decided to submit to an identical treatment. Indeed, there were so many seemingly misplaced names or eccentrically designated parts on display, in this particular section of the exhibition, that one had cause to wonder whether their perpetrator would have been capable of applying the correct names to the relevant parts, or of naming the relevant parts correctly, had circumstances obliged him to do so.

Yet if that kind of mental or psychological surrealism wasn't weird enough, what followed was even more so! For the surrealism of names, as one might term it, was only one aspect of Connolly's art, and arguably not the most revolutionary or unconventional aspect, either! There was also a surrealism of colours applicable to paintings in which roses were bright green, dark blue, or black; tulips grey, emerald, or dark brown; leaves bright orange, pink, or blue; trees red or pale blue; hedges black or dark grey; suns bright blue or mauve; clouds yellow, cabbages violet, skies green, apples purple, bananas maroon, earth silver, and so on. Really, it was difficult to distinguish shit from sugar when one found the natural world painted in these unrepresentative colours! One was made conscious of how much one's ability to recognize familiar shapes depended on their colours, how much one took these colours for granted, and how even the most carefully and accurately defined shape became somewhat ambiguous and even problematic when deprived of its rightful hue. But there may have been something in it for the colour blind, Keating reflected, as he lay beside his sleeping beauty and gazed up at the brightly-painted white ceiling which, under the light-restricting influence of his cotton curtains, looked more like a smooth grey cloud. For those who couldn't see red, even a dark-blue rose would probably have been a more interesting, not to say satisfying, proposition than a relatively colourless one. And what applied to roses must surely apply just as much, he imagined, to a number of other natural phenomena - for example, trees and apples.

An arm stirred beside him, moved a little farther across the pillow on which it was resting, and came to a gentle halt against his left earlobe. It was evident that Rebecca moved parts of her body about during sleep from time to time, and did so, moreover, in a manner which suggested that she knew exactly to what extent. But suggestions could be misleading, and just because Keating had had the good fortune to have woken up, the previous morning, at a time when Rebecca's left hand was in the process of sliding down his stomach towards his flaccid penis, it didn't mean that she could be depended upon to do the same thing again today, and with greater moment! Even so, sharing a bed with another person was certainly something of an adventure. One could never be absolutely sure what would happen during one's sleep, whether, on waking, one would find the various limbs resting in exactly the same positions as the night before or whether, on the contrary, they would be in positions affording one a degree of sensuous pleasure at the other person's expense. That, at any rate, was how it seemed to Keating when he reflected on his previous experiences with bed partners - few-and-far-between as they were. In all but one case he had been the partner to wake up first, the person with the privilege, if he so desired, of contemplating or smelling or even touching and gently caressing the sleeping body beside him, of experiencing that peculiar sense of possession which such a privilege entails.

He smiled faintly and relapsed into his reflections on Connolly's art exhibition again. It was certainly one of the strangest exhibitions he had ever seen, whether privately or in his professional capacity as a correspondent for 'Arts Monthly', and one that, in the main, merely confirmed him in his low opinion of contemporary art. Of course, he had to admit that there were exceptions to the general rule. There were dedicated artists who, even these days, produced work of real artistic value - perhaps of lesser artistic value than Rembrandt or El Greco or Tintoretto, yet nevertheless of some value when judged by traditional painterly standards. As a rule, however, artists like Alan Connolly prevailed, purveyors of the sham art which circumstances had obliged him to review yesterday, and which he hadn't yet got around to writing about. How he would bring himself to do so, he didn't know. But as a salaried member of Webb's staff, he was under strict orders to get it done as quickly as possible and sent off to the printers before Monday. There wouldn't even be time for the editor to look it over beforehand.... Not that Webb knew anything much about contemporary art and would be likely, in consequence, to find fault with it from a connoisseur's standpoint! On the contrary, his only real interest lay in ensuring that words prejudicial to the financial or legal welfare of the magazine didn't get printed, and, as far as that went, he knew exactly what to look for, the crafty sod! So it was up to Keating not to invalidate his trust. Up to Anthony, in other words, not to succumb to the temptation which was developing within him to slate contemporary art, through Alan Connolly, in a manner guaranteed to excite public hostility and, no less importantly, to slate Connolly, through contemporary art, in a manner guaranteed to excite private hostility from the artist himself. The principal thing was to restrain one's subjective feelings in the interests of objective reality, to give an outline of the exhibition for what it was rather than for what, in one's unreasonableness, one would prefer it to have been. There could be no question, therefore, of one's condemning the artist on the perfectly feasible grounds that what he did wasn't really art. That would have been sheer imbecility! The only reasonable stance was one that recognized his work as somehow inevitable, as something that had a right to be done at this point in time, given the overly exploitative and, from a bourgeois or middle-class standpoint, decadent nature of the age. Otherwise one would fall into the ignominious trap of wishful thinking, of self-righteous moralizing about the need to improve contemporary art when, to all appearances, it couldn't be improved upon, least of all in a way that equated improvement with a return to former standards, and to standards, moreover, quite beyond the abilities or beneath the inclinations of most living artists.

Viewed objectively, the small number of genuine conservatives, analogous in some respects to the purveyors of popular culture, might be producing work of an artistically superior nature to those who, after their decadent fashion, reflected the times and preferred to be avant-garde. But that wasn't to say that they were saints and the others, the more contemporaneous, abject sinners! Au contraire, their rejection of avant-garde trends was, in itself, a kind of spiritual suicide, a denial of the age and, as such, a concession to the spirit of aesthetic determinism, with its representational objectivity. For just as the most admirable of men were those who aided the development of a new culture when an old one was crumbling around them, men who, like the first Christians, faced torture and death in the name of a new religion, so, conversely, the least admirable were those who endeavoured to sustain the old, crumbling culture beyond its proper life-span and consequently held up the development of the new - assuming, of course, that a new culture was really in the making. It was a question, in short, of knowing when to create and when to undermine or destroy; of knowing when creation was more credible, because pertinent, than destruction and, conversely, destruction more credible, because pertinent, than creation.

Now as far as contemporary art, particularly in the West, was concerned, it was the destroyers and underminers who reigned supreme, the men who, realizing there was little to be got from traditional religion by way of nourishing the arts, had turned, via the insidiously narcissistic route of l'art-pour-l'art, to science and technology for their inspiration. And the result, needless to say, was the wintry aridity that characterized the representative or, more usually, non-representative art of our time, the ridiculously simplistic or crack-brained works of people like Alan Connolly! The result was not art, since no genuine art can flourish after the decline of the religion which brought it into being and provided it with the thematic guidance and sustenance it requires, but sham art - the prevailing scientifically-minded worms that fed on the putrescent corpse of the culture which had engendered them. The result, then, was not something to be particularly pleased about! It was simply a fact of contemporary life, one that had to be understood and endured no less than any other. And, in this respect, Keating was slowly but surely becoming more adept, more resigned to the superficially fatuous though, at the same time, profoundly meaningful works of the leading contemporary artists. In a sense, most of them weren't really artists at all, since the criteria of genuine art had long ceased to apply and could not now be resurrected. And neither were they truly contemporary, since photography was the real art of the age. As petty-bourgeois anti-artists, however, they still had a valid role to play in chronicling Western cultural decline from a perspective rooted, degeneratively, in the decadence of a civilization. Whether or not one liked the fact, the legitimacy of that role was beyond dispute. The only alternative to sham art was no art at all, and until that day arrived, until the civilized West declined to a point where it couldn't decline any further, having reached rock bottom, so to speak, of its materialistic degeneration, the arid productions of its leading cultural representatives would have to be tolerated, come what may! After all, were they not the only kind of spiritual fodder to which the civilized West could properly be expected to relate at present? It was a thought which Keating loathed to entertain, though he had to admit that it contained a germ of truth so far as the bourgeois intelligentsia were concerned.

He felt a bodily movement beside him, followed by the sound of a voice asking whether he had slept well. Startled out of his sombre reflections, he turned over to discover Rebecca staring across the pillow at him. He smiled his appreciation of this fact and responded affirmatively. "But not as well as you, if your expression was anything to judge by," he added, putting an arm round her bare waist. "You not only woke up after me, you bloody-well got to sleep before me as well!"

"I'm usually a very sound and compulsive sleeper," she admitted, with a hearty yawn in attendance for good measure. "I can usually sleep for eight hours at a stretch."

"Six is the most I can manage," he murmured, becoming a trifle embarrassed by the mutual bad breath being exhaled with every word. It was more than enough to make one feel both ashamed and disgusted with oneself! But it was virtually inevitable, a fact of life with which a majority of couples who shared the same bed probably had to persevere. Doubtless most of them came to some arrangement for lessening or even avoiding it. One of the couple concerned would always get up before the other or, assuming that wasn't possible, they would make a point of either not speaking at all or of only speaking with their backs turned on each other, so that the bad-breath factor wouldn't unduly impair or undermine their relationship. For until one brushed one's teeth, etc., and thereby freshened-up one's mouth, the reality of bad breath would have to be borne as stoically as possible. Providing one wasn't coupled to a person who suffered from halitosis throughout the day, one could at least consider oneself relatively fortunate.

"So what are you intending to do today?" asked Rebecca sleepily.

"Firstly, I shall have to get started on that review I was supposed to have written yesterday evening," replied Keating, primarily addressing his softly-spoken words at the ceiling, "and then, if there's any time left before lunch, I'll take you for a stroll round Croydon. After lunch, we can take a bus out to Redhill and visit one of my friends, and later, well ..." He smiled vaguely and lapsed into a ponderous silence. It wasn't easy to address oneself to the ceiling, since it tended to highlight one's motivation for doing so. Better to turn one's head from time to time and expose the other person to a whiff of bad breath. After all, he wasn't the only one to blame. He turned to face her and offered her a wan smile, a smile not open but sort of closed-in upon itself.

"I'm sure we'll find something to do," murmured Rebecca, reciprocating in kind.

"Yes, I'm sure we will," he whispered, and he gave her a quick peck on the lips as though in confirmation of some new-found confidence.

At that moment, however, the telephone rang and, feeling slightly apprehensive, he climbed out of bed and hurried into the adjoining room to answer it.

"Hello Tony, it's Neil here," the voice on the other end of the line responded to his formal announcement. "I phoned your place three times last night and couldn't get a reply, so I assume you were out."

"Until 1.00am to be precise," Keating admitted. "I was entertaining a very attractive young lady, actually."

"Not Rebecca Tonks, by any chance?"

"Why, yes! How did you guess?"

Wilder sighed before saying: "It wasn't a question of guessing, Tony. It was simply a case of being confronted, yesterday afternoon, by an irate composer who was of the express opinion that one of us had raped and abducted his daughter."

"Raped and abducted?" echoed Keating in amazement. "What d'you mean?"

"Perhaps that's something you could tell me," rejoined Wilder threateningly. "It seems there were one or two things you didn't tell me about, the other evening; things that led to my being accused of them and made to feel a fool yesterday afternoon."

The nervous excitement that shot through Keating's body, with the reception of this information, nearly caused him to urinate on the carpet. He could barely hold the telephone receiver still. "You didn't have any trouble with the interview, did you?" he gasped, after a few seconds' trembling silence.

Wilder repeated his sighing act of the moment before, then said: "Unfortunately it didn't take place, Tony. He absolutely refused to let me into his house to conduct it."

"Refused?" Keating sank to his knees as his legs suddenly lost their ability to support him.

"It's most unlikely that he'll allow anyone to interview him now," asserted Wilder. "Unless, perhaps, he finds out exactly what went on between you and his daughter on Thursday, and is satisfied that it wasn't as bad as his housekeeper has evidently led him to believe. And then he'll want to find out what's going on between you now, won't he?"

Keating chewed his lower lip in desperation and then emitted a loud groan. It appeared that he had landed himself in quite the most serious fix of his entire journalistic career at 'Arts Monthly'! For a horrible thought suddenly assailed his worry-stricken mind. What if Mr Tonks had been in touch with Nicholas Webb about it? Or the police, for that matter?

"He made no mention of having done so to me," replied Wilder to a desperate question based on that assumption. "But we have no reason to assume that, if he hasn't already been in touch with them, he won't do either or both next week, particularly if he doesn't find out what's happened to his daughter in the meantime. And if he does do either or both, then it's you who must take the consequences, Tony, not me! I’m merely your dupe, remember? And not a very grateful one, either!"

"I'm dreadfully sorry, Neil, but I had absolutely no idea this would happen," confessed Keating, trembling. "After all, I was obliged to go to the Merlin Gallery yesterday afternoon."

"Yes, but you could have told me what actually happened between you and Mr Tonks' daughter on your last visit to her house, couldn't you?" Wilder snapped. "But perhaps you'll tell me now."

Anthony Keating sighed his heartfelt reluctance at having to expatiate on that subject, what with Rebecca in the adjoining room, presumably still in bed, but, realizing he had little alternative, he began to explain things in a subdued tone-of-voice and as well as his distinctly nervous condition would allow - the most important thing being to make it perfectly clear to his fellow-correspondent that there had been no question of rape or abduction. On the contrary, a sexual relationship had developed by mutual consent - naturally, joyfully, inevitably.

"A little rushed all the same, don't you think?" opined Wilder in the strained wake of his colleague's explanation. "You hadn't known her for very long, after all."

"Yes, I realize that," Keating conceded. "But, under the favourable circumstances, the house being otherwise deserted and Rebecca being conspicuously affable, not to say erotically attired, it seemed the most reasonable step. I mean, what would you have done in my position?" he asked in desperation.

In spite of his seriousness, Neil Wilder felt compelled to stifle a snigger with this question. There could be no denying the fact that, for all his faults, Tony was a likeable person! "It would depend on whether she was my kind of woman or not before I could hope to reach a decision about that," he at length rather academically replied. "In such a delicate matter as love, we're all on our own. But even if I can't particularly blame you for having done what you did, it ought to be fairly obvious that sex at such short notice, and in the context it evidently happened, is more likely to be open to allegations of rape, from external sources, than would be the case had it taken place following a period of courtship. You have to be very careful where some of the older generation are concerned, you know. I didn't see the housekeeper personally, but I suspect she was getting on a bit."

"In her early seventies apparently," obliged Keating, recalling what Rebecca had later told him.

"Well, that speaks for itself, doesn't it?" declared Wilder. "And as for your girlfriend's father, who is probably more of an idealist than a prude, what do you expect him to think?"

Keating frowned gravely. Such a rhetorical question was just like Neil and it pained him to have to swallow it. The way matters stood at present, he could only expect Mr Tonks to think the worst. But there was, it suddenly occurred to him, a means of getting the composer to think less badly. Perhaps even a means of inducing him to change his mind and grant the interview: namely Rebecca herself. She could phone home, tell him where she was, what she thought of her latest boyfriend, and so on. Yes, that had to be the solution. After all, who else could he be expected to believe?

"Well?" pressed Wilder, after several seconds' silence had prompted him to wonder whether his colleague was still on the line.

"Listen Neil, I believe I have the solution," revealed Keating with enthusiasm. "If I can get Rebecca to phone home this morning, we should have this mess cleared up by Monday. Her father might even allow me to interview him tomorrow or the day after."

"I hope he does," came the slightly sceptical response from a more experienced correspondent. "Otherwise you won't find life particularly congenial at 'Arts Monthly' next week! I wish you luck."

The telephone clicked off, leaving Anthony Keating to his worried thoughts. Of all the unfortunate things to happen! And just at a time when life was beginning to show signs of promise! He clambered to his feet with some difficulty, staggered back to the bedroom, where Rebecca was brushing out her long dark hair in front of the dressing-table mirror, and threw himself across the bed.

"So what was all that about?" she asked, getting up from the small stool on which she had been kneeling and going across to him. "You look quite upset."

"I am actually," said Keating, who then proceeded to reveal the substance of his conversation with Neil Wilder.

"A bit of a problem" she agreed, as his divulgence ran its sombre course and culminated in his request for her assistance. "But I can do what you want, if you really think it'll help."

"Please go ahead," he urged her.

A naked goddess about to protect her devotee, she strode calmly into the adjoining room and closed the door behind her. For ten minutes the sound of her muffled voice reached Keating's ears and kept him on tenterhooks. It seemed an eternity of suffering while the conversation, presumably with her father, droned on, and always with the possibility of his being called upon to offer an apology or, at the very least, an explanation of his behaviour. But at length, when he was on the verge of a nervous collapse, the conversation ended, and a slightly pale-faced but still relatively calm-looking Rebecca Tonks returned to the bedroom. "It's alright," she said, offering him a reassuring smile. "He'll give you the interview Monday afternoon."