Corduroy Mansions

65. Caravaggio as a Role Model for Boys

James chose sparkling mineral water and a glass of house white. ‘I shouldn’t drink at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘And I normally don’t. But all that Caravaggio, you know - what else can one do?’

‘Did you see the film about him?’ asked Caroline. ‘The Derek Jarman film?’

James nodded. ‘Caravaggio doesn’t exactly come out of it very well. He had a penchant for knives. And that awful scene where he murders his model by slitting his throat.’ He shuddered, and reached for the sparkling mineral water. ‘Do you think artists have to lead intense lives? Do you think that you can be a great artist and be bourgeois? Or does it all have to be very gritty? Caravaggiesque.’

Caroline considered this. ‘Let’s try to think of artists who were straightforward, conventional types. Can you think of any?’

James looked up at the ceiling. ‘Difficult. It seems that the artistic personality has a certain contrariness to it. If you’re conventional, then perhaps there’s no impulse to create.’

Caroline helped herself to a small amount of James’s water. ‘So creativity comes from conflict? Inner conflict? You have to be hurt into making art?’

James thought that this was probably true. ‘Art comes from a desire to make sense of the world and one’s experience in it,’ he intoned. ‘It’s intended to make up for the separation that we feel between us as humans and beauty. The artist tries to recreate beauty - to make it whole again.’

‘If the artist is really concerned with beauty,’ said Caroline.

James thought this self-evident. ‘Surely he is?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so. Look at the sort of art we’ve just been discussing - installation art, the unmade beds and so on. Where’s the beauty in that?’

James grinned. ‘In an unmade bed?’

‘Yes. How can that have anything to do with beauty?’

James thought for a moment. ‘Ugliness can be beautiful,’ he said. ‘Anything can be beautiful. And maybe that’s what a certain sort of artist is trying to do: he - or she, of course - is trying to open our eyes to a beauty we would not otherwise see.’

Their plates arrived and were placed before them. Caroline looked at her pasta - all twisted shapes and beauty, an installation perhaps. She felt that she should say something about it, but the topic of generalised beauty took precedence over the particular, and certainly over the beauty to be found in pasta. James’s last remark interested her; it was right in one way, but she thought that in another way it was wrong. If everything was beautiful - as he appeared to be suggesting - did that not deprive beauty of all its aesthetic, and indeed moral, force?

‘How can everything be beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Human suffering, for example? Is that beautiful? A scene of carnage? A place where suffering has occurred?’

‘Some things are horrible,’ James said. ‘Some things are hateful. What you’ve just mentioned is horrible, and hateful too, but surely it can be beautiful in the sense that it’s part of our world, and our world, in its totality, is beautiful?’

‘Rubbish,’ said Caroline. And then added, ‘What about a discordance in music? Is that beautiful?’

James looked at her reproachfully. ‘You’re being very aggressive, ’ he said. ‘Why don’t you eat your lunch instead of attacking me and everything I say? Go on, eat your lunch, you horrid girl!’

He laughed, and she laughed too. Dear James: he was so unlike . . . so unlike Caravaggio. She reached out and put her hand on his, just for a moment. The contact was brief, fleeting, but she noticed that he tensed; she could tell. She cast her eyes down to her plate. ‘Don’t you like to be touched?’ she asked.

His manner was one of affected nonchalance. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘But you flinched just then, when I put my hand on yours. You did, you know.’

He frowned. ‘Maybe I did. It’s just that I’m not used to being touched. I like to think of myself as quite tactile, but only when I’m in control, when I’m the one doing the touching. I suppose I’m just not used to not being in control.’

Caroline sighed. ‘That’s sad. It really is.’

James looked up. ‘I know. But it’s difficult, sometimes, to deal with something you know you want to change. You can’t just do it like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘You have to understand why it is that you feel the way you do and then you have to tackle it.’

Caroline was silent. ‘Did something unsettling happen to you, James?’ she asked. ‘Is that why . . . ?’

James met her gaze. I love his eyes, she thought. Nobody I know has such sensitive eyes. Like the eyes of a Botticelli model. Wide. Light brown.

‘There was something,’ said James. ‘Something I saw a long time ago. I don’t really like to talk about it, though.’

‘Then you don’t need to,’ said Caroline.

He seemed to mull this over for a few moments. ‘No, maybe I do. Maybe that’s what I really have to do. Think about it. Talk about it.’ He took a sip from his wine glass. ‘I read somewhere that this is exactly what you should do. You should talk about the thing that frightens you and in that way you deprive it of its power.’

Caroline listened carefully. She had suspected ever since their conversation over homemade lemon gems that there was something that had to be dealt with in James’s past and now she knew that it was so. He was undoubtedly right: one had to confront these things if one wanted to lance the boil that they represented. In her own case, there had been the incident at the pony club, which she had brooded over for years, until somebody - somebody quite unconnected with the pony club - had casually mentioned it and it had all come pouring out. That was when she had discovered that what had seemed large was, in fact, small - ridiculously so - and suddenly she was able to talk about the pony club again without feeling guilty. I did not cheat, she said to herself. I did not. But although she was convinced of the liberating power of revelation, she was not sure that this bistro, over lunch, was quite the right place and time to encourage James to talk.

‘Perhaps we should talk about it some other time,’ she said gently. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m not willing to listen - I am, I really am. It’s just that . . .’

James looked at her imploringly. ‘I want to talk, Caroline. I want to tell you about what I saw behind the cricket pavilion . . .’

‘Of course you can . . . But couldn’t we go back to the flat? Go back to Corduroy Mansions and talk there?’

James shook his head. ‘The moment is sometimes right,’ he said. ‘And . . . Well, I feel secure here. Do you understand?’

She reached out to take his hand again but stopped herself in time. He saw this and smiled. ‘No, please go ahead. It seems right. Please go ahead. I’ll talk. You hold my hand. I’ll talk.’

But she did not have the opportunity. Two men at a neighbouring table had just paid their bill and one of them now stood up and looked intently in her direction.