Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt Read Free Book Online Page B

round’ – or sending other customers packing with one of her choice farewells: ‘Back to your filthy urinal, Granny, back to your cottaging, and don’t show that cock-sucking face of yours here again or I’ll give you a fourpenny one,’ while pausing elegantly, with perfect erect composure, to receive a compliment from a more favoured member kissing her hand whom I dimly recognize from photos in the papers as someone famous. And Francis, who told me he first came here with the queer Oxford aesthete Brian Howard twenty years ago, is again at my side making sure my glass is full but, unaccountably, we’re now somewhere smaller and underground where there’s a jukebox playing Johnnie Ray’s ‘Just Walking in the Rain’ and a couple of large amiable men with big red forearms are dealing out drinks from behind the bar and talking to each other in snatches of Polari. ‘There’s a palone putting on her slap in the carsey,’ says one, with an exaggerated moue. I start getting interested, always up for a new lingo, but minutes later, I don’t know why, we’re outside again, just Francis, George and me now, and we go up more stairs and across landings with Francis saying, ‘I just know it’s here somewhere, you can always get a drink before dawn, for some reason I think it’s called the Pink Elephant,’ and then oddly we are back in Muriel’s, which Francis says is a place to go to lose your inhibitions, except there are not many people now, not many inhibitions either, and we are all standing around the bar and there’s banter between Muriel and Francis. ‘That’s all the facts when you come down to it,’ Francis is saying. ‘When did you last have all the fucks, de-ah?’ Muriel is saying. But everything’s slowed up, slowed down, and we have been here for ever, haven’t moved for as far back as I can remember from these same four walls with the same music in this same unchanging world, and I don’t remember anything more until I wake up and hear George asking Francis plaintively in his blocked nasal tones, ‘What d’you ’ave to givim ten pahn for? All ’e ad to do was open the fuckin’ door,’ and Francis saying, ‘Try to get some sleep, George, we’ve got to leave early in the morning you know,’ and everything’s stillturning in the dark and I work out I’m on the green velvet sofa and the dark goes round and round and George starts talking again in fits and starts nasal-thick as he sleeps. I want to throw up but I know I can’t, I mustn’t be sick, and I drift back into sleep for a few moments before Francis, all dressed and fresh and rosy, is handing me a cup of steaming tea and saying he and George, who’s standing behind looking like a successful boxer in neatly pressed singlet and trousers with red braces hanging down by his sides, are going over to Paris via Newhaven and Dieppe, then taking a
wagon-lit
in the night train down to the Côte d’Azur which sounds so glamorous and shimmeringly alluring, and never more so than when we’re standing outside in the damp grey morning on the cobblestone court, with George lighting his first cigarette of the day.
    I bid them goodbye, transformed like Cinderella back into student boy, the threadbare scholar in his grey polo-neck sweater, ill at ease, with all the time in the world to drift and be unhappy and have no destination in sight beyond the provincial cloisters where his friends won’t believe all he’s done and seen even if, he reasons confusedly as the train rumbles up towards Cambridge, he could be bothered to let them in on this his big new secret.

3
    Bacon’s Boswell
    I always come back to Cambridge in a strange state. I’m really pleased to be going around with Bacon like this and talking to him, often alone and late into the night. I really like going to all these