Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

The paramedics arrived then. ‘Jesus!’ said one of them to Adderley. ‘What happened?’

He showed them the mahlstick. ‘Got this in my eye,’ he said. ‘Hurts like hell.’

They gave him painkillers but they didn’t seem to help much. When they put him in the ambulance his wife gave me a hard look and said, ‘Why don’t you go along and hold his hand — I’m stuck here with the kids.’

All the way to the hospital he held on to my hand. One of the paramedics was with us while the other one drove, so the Prof, didn’t say anything to me but he squeezed my hand and mouthed the words, ‘ Please forgive me .’

‘ It’s OK ,’ I mouthed back. ‘ I ’ m sorry I hurt you .’ I was, too.

At the hospital they examined him in A & E and sent him up to surgery to have the eye removed. When he was out of surgery I sat by his bed and waited for him to come out of the anaesthetic. After a while he put his hand up to the bandages and felt around, then he opened his one eye. ‘I’m glad I’ve still got one eye to see you with,’ he said.

I said, ‘I’m glad you’re glad.’ I didn’t know what else to say. He seemed humbled by what had happened. I took his hand and said, ‘When you’re ready to go back to work I’ll pose for you again if you want me to.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Looking at you made me want to paint in a new way. I don’t want to do ugly any more.’ He closed his eye and went to sleep then and I got a minicab back to his place for my bike. It was dark by then. His wife came to the door when she heard the car. She didn’t say anything, just stood there with the light behind her. Then she closed the door and I rode home with Marianne Faithfull and ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ in my head again.

Brian was back at work in a week with his eye still bandaged and he said his wife had left him and taken the kids. He didn’t seem to be exactly broken up about it; he told me this was the second wife who’d left him. He had visitation rights for the daughter of the first marriage, now a teenager, and he expected the same for the little son and daughter of the second. I had the feeling that he wasn’t up for a lot of quality time with his kids.

He wanted me to pose again so I did. When I came out from behind the screen I dropped the kimono and we stood looking at each other.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Here I am,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’ I didn’t know I was going to say that. Then again, I think I did. And that was how I became Brian Adderley’s mistress. He turned out to be not such a bad guy, or maybe I turned out to be not such a good girl. His new paintings were a whole lot better than the old ones, they were less about him and more about what he was looking at. Which was me most of the time. We drank a lot of cognac and beer and we ate a lot of pizza, Chinese, Thai and Indian take-aways. I put on a few pounds which quite pleased Brian. ‘The more of you, the better,’ he said. His new paintings were better — more sensitive than the earlier ones. I couldn’t help being proud of that.

When they removed Brian’s eye in hospital the surgeon inserted an implant made of coral compound which was attached to the eye muscles so that it could move naturally. It took four weeks for this to heal, then we went to London and stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel for the two days it took to make the artificial eye.

The ocularists were two brothers, Karl and Georg (pronounced Gayorg) Lichtheim, who had a studio in Berwick Street. Both of them were tall and thin with grey hair. Karl did all the steps up to the painting, then Georg painted the eye and put in the little red threads for the veins.

The room where they worked was big and bright and looked something like a dentist’s surgery. Equipment everywhere. Charts on the walls and diplomas from Germany. First they took an impression of the eye socket and made a mould. Then from the mould they made a wax shell which was carved and fitted. The iris button was inserted in this and the position checked for accuracy when the eye moved. From this they cast the plastic shape which would be the finished eye. This was ground down and a temporary plastic shell made. Then the eye was painted and clear plastic was processed over the paint.

So there we were then. We went back to Humberside and it was business and pleasure as usual. Brian still had an eye for the girls but I was the only one that ever was invited to the studio. Even if he’d had others I wouldn’t have minded — it was an OK arrangement while I finished the course but I wasn’t in love with him. He had proprietary feelings about me and tried to convince me that I could become a better painter. ‘I’ve changed because of what happened between us,’ he said. ‘That experience has been absorbed into my painting and you should make use of it in yours.’

He liked to talk about Artemisia Gentileschi. Probably he had fantasies of her when he was in bed with me. He bought a book about her and one about her and her father, Orazio. He was dead keen on Artemisia’s Judith Slaying Holofernes . I believe he’d have liked to be dominated by a woman like that Judith. ‘Look at the arms on her!’ he used to say. ‘She didn’t need the sword for the job, she could have torn his head off with her bare hands. And look at this one with Judith and the maidservant sneaking out with the head in a basket, how the hand she holds up to block the light of the candle throws a shadow on her face like a death-cloud. And notice that she’s still got the sword — she’s ready for anything. What a woman!’

‘Judith or Artemisia?’ I said.

‘Both.’ He opened the other book. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘this is Orazio’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt , with Joseph having a kip while Baby Jesus has a pint or so of Mary’s Best. Nobody does a better Jesus on the tit than Orazio. Look at Mary’s sweet expression and the dreamy sensuality in the eye of Baby Jesus. Absolutely first-rate. Now let’s see what Orazio does with Judith and Holofernes. He seems to have avoided the scene where she tops him — a little too rich for his blood maybe. The closest he gets is Judith with Abra, her maidservant, and the head. The head is like a hired prop and the whole thing, which is necessarily posed, looks posed, as if he’s told his two female models, “Pretend you’ve just heard something and you’re scared.” So Judith looks up as if she’s just heard a pizza delivery at the door and Abra isn’t sure whether she’s heard anything or not. Orazio just didn’t have the balls for Judith.’

‘Maybe you’d like to do Judith and Holofernes,’ I said to Brian.

‘I might just have a go at that,’ he said. ‘You’ll be Judith and I’ll be Holofernes.’

‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said. So we did Judith and Holofernes. I posed for Judith and the maidservant and I photographed Brian in the Holofernes pose and costume. He painted two pictures. In the first one Holofernes is in white tie and wearing all his medals. He’s leaning back against Judith with his left hand between her legs while she garrots him with a white silk scarf. She’s wearing diamonds and she’s more out of than in a strapless white satin sheath. Abra, the maidservant, is naked except for white stockings as she kneels in front of Holofernes embracing his legs and looking up at his last moments.

The second painting is a closer view with Judith and Abra kissing as the maidservant dangles the head by its hair. Both paintings were done in the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi, and Judith had arms like a stevedore. A very striking pair of pictures, both of them over two feet high. It took us three months for the two of them and I stopped counting the hours I posed, the drinks we drank, the takeaways we ate, and the pounds I gained.