Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

We sleep when Jean-Louis returns us to the Avenue Montaigne before dawn. He inserts a CD in the player and wakes us with Jan Garbarek’s Madar . Another day begins; another night awaits us.

I am not an artist. In my house are works of art: Sèvres, Meissen, and Minton porcelain; glass by Gallé and Lalique; a Sevigny armoire; Hofmann chairs and tables and other pieces from the Wiener Werkstätte; Kelim rugs; a T’ang dynasty horse. On the walls are paintings by Daumier, Redon, Guardi, Whistler, and Waterhouse; drawings by Tiepolo, Claude, Friedrich, and Rethel. I can buy art and look at it and be moved by it but to produce it I have not the capability. I look at Daumier’s little painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and I try to feel how he felt when he painted it. I try to think his thoughts; I understand his use of light and shade and colour, the play of weights and volumes, the density of the tinted air in which Don Quixote on Rosinante and Sancho on Dapple are at the same time solid and ghostly, dream and reality. But if I were given a blank panel I could not see what he saw in it; my hand would not know what his hand knew when it held the brush. There is in my life nothing as good as what he did.

There will never again be a Daumier or a Claude; the time for that kind of seeing, that kind of thinking, is past. Art now is too often the childish showing-off of talentless poseurs supported by collectors at the cutting edge of idiocy. We are all of us strapped in a car that speeds towards a blank wall while crash-dummies race ahead of us to die for our sins.

What are the thoughts of Roswell Clark as I write this? In addition to the income from Crash Test he has now had from me seventy thousand pounds with which to buy unencumbered minutes, hours, days, and weeks. I have given him time in which to be open to what will come to him. What will come to him?

OK. Deep breath. My wife, Jennifer. She taught flute at St Paul’s School and she was a good-enough flautist to play with the London Sinfonietta. She was a handsome woman, tall and graceful, dark and brooding. She and I had a fair number of rows but we experienced the world together; if it looked like rain we both noticed it and said something about it; we read things out to each other from The Times and the Guardian , went to concerts and watched videos together. Now the world goes on without her; she’s not here to see the nights and days, the rain, the changing of the seasons. At odd moments I want to tell her something or show her something, then it hits me again: she’s gone.

It happened on a rainy Saturday night in November. We’d been to dinner with friends in Highgate. It was an OK evening; the bonne femme was good; the beef olives were good; the wine was good; the conversation was lively. We’d got around to talking about how busy everyone was, how most of us had more things to do than there was time for. ‘Not Roswell,’ said Jennifer. ‘He has more time than things to do, but he keeps busy thinking about the things that nobody else has time for.’

‘Einstein had the same problem,’ I said.

‘So when are you going to come up with a universal theory?’ said Mark Simpson, our.host.

‘I’m working on a new relativity theory,’ I said. ‘This one is about wives and husbands.’

‘That was more than Einstein could handle,’ said Mark’s wife Nicola, and then Toby Gresham got us into the subject of the expanding universe while Jennifer gave me a look that said, ‘What?’

My answering look said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ was her wordless reply. ‘Expansion can be a bad idea,’ said Jessica Gold. ‘Look what happened when Biba moved into Derry & Toms,’ and the conversation went on in various directions along with the cognac and the grappa.

‘Don’t forget that you’re driving,’ said Jennifer as my glass was refilled.

‘How could I, with you to remind me?’

‘More coffee?’ said Nicola.

It was pouring when we left; the streets were very black and shiny; the headlights of oncoming cars lit up curtains of rain, the windscreen-wipers flopped back and forth like an endless argument and in our little room on wheels the atmosphere was getting thicker. I said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ said Jennifer. ‘Shouldn’t you have taken a right back there?’

‘Probably,’ I said. We didn’t visit the Simpsons that often, and on the return trip the one-way system in Camden Town sometimes defeated me. Things got blacker and more spaced out with dim lights here and there and I realised that we were in the usual wrong place somewhere around King’s Cross.

‘How much did you have to drink?’ said Jennifer.

‘Not enough,’ I snarled as I swung the car around into an intersection that seemed very dark and undefined.

‘Look out!’ said Jennifer as we were hit on the passenger side. Her last words.

I haven’t driven since.

‘Stop it, Sarah,’ I said to myself. Because I could feel myself juicing up to make this man do better. He was failing in some way, he was putting out failure pheromones and they were getting me excited. Not for sex but for the hardcore depravity of trying to build towers out of wet dishcloths. He was very evasive in conversation; what was he hiding? For that matter, what was I hiding by turning my critical faculties on him rather than on myself?

How had Giles and I fallen in love? I met him in 1984 when I was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! Sometimes that seems a hundred years ago. My name was Burton then and I was working at the Nikolai Chevorski Gallery in Cork Street. Chevorski always reminded me of the joke about the man who packaged goatshit and sold it as brain food. I was on the gallery staff because he’d seen me there the year before and offered me a job on the spot. He was a short man and he liked to have tall women around him. At the time I was with a small firm of auctioneers who were about to go out of business so I was happy to make the move.

The show at which I was hired by Mr Chevorski was entitled Haruspications and featured twenty-four large paintings of chicken guts by Winston Breck. Like most of the shows at that gallery it received a good deal of attention. Seymour Daly of The Times said, ‘Although it might be argued by some that Breck has chickened out, he has done it in a gutsy manner, and by doing it in our collective face he has forced us to see what we may have looked away from before this.’ Noah Thawle of the Guardian said, ‘Semiotically baleful in their revelation of what one would rather not see, these paintings with their anatomical mysteries have a visceral impact that augurs well for Breck’s future.’ Lucy Camaro of the Daily Telegraph predicted that ‘Breck’s paintings may well convert more than a few of his viewers to vegetarianism but inviting one, as they do, to descry a personal destiny in the mantic disembowelment of chickens, they exert a terrible fascination.’ Lena Waye of the Independent found ‘… the metaphor less than inspired. It may be that those who pay money for old rope will splash out on chicken guts; and the art market being what it is, they can always sell them at a profit.’

Before the show had even opened George Rubcek and Darius Fitzimmons had bought three of the paintings for their collection, so the word was out that the oracles had said yes. ‘I don’t really know much about this kind of brain food,’ I told Chevorski.