The Bat Tattoo

2 Sarah Varley

God, am I going to become an embarrassment to myself? Crying on the steps of the V & A! Not even on a bench but right there on the steps where people had to walk around me. A cry for help? From whom, from what? What am I going to do next, wander the streets in a nightdress?

The morning started off all right. I had a whole clear day ahead of me, nothing coming up except Chelsea on Saturday. Poached egg on toast, grapefruit juice, tea with lemon and The Times. I never bother with the top of the front page — it’s always some politician lying or cheating or caught with his trousers down. But there on the bottom:

WE’VE GOT ONLY 500M YEARS LEFT TO LIVE

The end of the world really is in sight. Scientists studying the fate of the Earth have warned that the expansion of the Sun will turn it into a desert in 500m years, much sooner than previously thought, write Polly Ghazi and Jonathan Leake.

The story went on to explain how this prediction had been arrived at; it seemed that previous calculations had given the Earth five billion years but suddenly, like Christmas, it was almost upon us. I’ll be long gone, I told myself, but it didn’t help. I reached inside my robe and touched my bat but that didn’t help either.

I suppose in five hundred million years Earth will long since have been deserted and there will be Earthlings living under domes on Mars and elsewhere but it won’t be the same, it won’t be Earth where when I was young you could sleep under the stars and wake up to see the mist rising from a lake you could swim in without vomiting. Earth where there used to be the Taj Mahal and the Himalayas, Bengal tigers and Peter Rabbit, Claude and Chardin and Haydn and The Goon Show. And eighteenth-century Chinese bowls with red bats, ‘symbol of happiness’. That’s when I started crying and I needed to go and look at my bat.

I splashed cold water on my face before I left and I was all right from my house down the New Kings Road to Parsons Green Lane and the tube station, still all right up the stairs and on to the platform. The sky was grey, it looked as if it no longer believed in itself.

A young woman stood near me on the platform: dark hair, short bob, dressed for business in a black suit, knee-length skirt, transparent black tights, black court shoes, lilac silk T-shirt, large black leather shoulder bag. Very attractive, with a sombre expression. She was reading the Penguin edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey when her mobile rang and she reached into the bag for it.

‘Hi,’ she said. I liked her voice. Pause. ‘Go ahead, I can talk.’ Pause. ‘We’ve been over this before, and you knew very well what you were getting into.’ Pause. ‘I know.’ Pause. ‘I know, Hilary, but this was not a for ever thing. You’d have liked there to be more but that’s all there was, so now you’ve got to move on to the next thing.’ Pause. ‘No, it isn’t easy for me to say, nothing’s easy for me. Here comes my train, I’ll talk to you later. Bye for now.’ She replaced the phone; there was no train in sight, and she returned to The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

When the train came we both got into the same carriage. She continued to read her book and I watched her and thought about her all the way to South Kensington. Was she breaking up with Hilary or only offering friendly advice? Was Hilary a man or a woman? I had the feeling that Hilary was a woman, and the woman I was watching was breaking up with her. Hilary, it seemed, had expected more. Poor Hilary. A cool customer, this one in the train, but she didn’t look very happy.

I never use the subway to the museums at South Ken; I don’t like the footsteps and the echoes and I always want to see the sky during that little walk to Cromwell Road. As always, it was solid with traffic, blatant with purpose, filling the day with emptiness. What’s happening to me? I thought — I didn’t use to feel this way.

The front of the V & A was partly covered with hoarding and there were men in hard hats doing I don’t know what. A white van with a ladder on top pulled up in front of the entrance steps and a hard-hat man got out, turned towards the workmen at the hoarding, and spoke into his mobile. For all I knew he was saying, ‘OK, let’s do it,’ and in a moment they’d blow up the museum with everything in it, all those fragile beauties and all the ghosts that lived there. Well, I thought, my mind is doing this, it’s nothing to do with me. But I was crying so I sat down on the steps.

There was this man, then, looking down at me and asking if I was all right. American. I don’t always have the proper responses to well-meaning people — all kinds of things get in the way sometimes. There was nothing objectionable about him. He was wearing jeans, a green anorak and a broad-brimmed green canvas hat, Timberlake boots, and had a rucksack slung from one shoulder. He was about my age, perhaps a year or two older, with nothing at all memorable about him; I guessed he often had trouble catching the waiter’s eye. I couldn’t tell if he was a tourist or not. He spoke quietly and his accent wasn’t as American as some I’ve heard. Maybe it was the state I was in, but he seemed a failed person to me. Failed at what? I don’t know — there was just that air about him and it put me off. He looked as if he expected to be rebuffed and I suppose I was brusque with him because of that. He was persistent, though, and after I said I was fine he said I didn’t look fine, so I told him I didn’t need help and he finally moved on.

I went in, checked my things, took the lift to Level D, and turned the corner into the long daylit gallery eager for my fix. The cool grey light refreshed my spirit immediately; it was what these beautiful things lived in, the air they breathed, a medium of non-forgetting. There was no one else in the gallery.

I’m sure that other people have their little rituals; I can’t be the only one. I took up my station facing the lobed bowl with the four red bats that were visible from where I stood. Mine is the lower one on the right, the upward-flying bat. With my right hand I reached into my jumper and touched the identical bat tattooed on my left shoulder. Ordinarily I do the whole thing in silence but this time I said very quietly, ‘Yongzheng, this is Sarah Varley requesting permission to feel better.’

Just then I heard footsteps so I took my hand out of my jumper and tried to look like everyone else. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that it was the man who’d spoken to me on the steps. This time he just stood behind me trying to see around me until I turned and was rather unkind to him. His only response was to ask me if I’d be finished in fifteen minutes or so. Americans! There was nothing for me to do but walk away although I was sure that he had designs on my bat. I hadn’t had my full fix and I was frustrated and deeply resentful at the intrusion.

I went round the corner towards the lift but then on impulse I moved back to where I could see him. He had his camera out and was taking pictures of the bowl with my bat. The day had started badly and now I seemed to be in danger of losing it altogether. Taking what was left of it back home was like carrying water in my hands.

What was my bat to that man? What did he want with it, why did he need it? Why couldn’t he find something else to get interested in? That sort of thing happens to me too often at auctions: when I want something it attracts other dealers who jump in and even if it’s a lot they don’t fancy they’ll bid it up out of sheer perversity and then drop out so I’m stuck with paying more than I’d planned to.

Between Earls Court and West Brompton the train stopped as if reality had run out of film and for a while there was silence except for a City type who said into his mobile, ‘I’m stuck here between Earls Court and West Brompton.’ When the train started he made another call and said, ‘Now we’re moving again.’

Think about something else, I said to myself. I thought about what I’d pack for Chelsea, reviewing costume jewellery, handbags, dresses, china, and various oddments. Should I loosen up and take the minaudière? I wondered. The hammer price at Christie’s last year was two-forty and I’d been saving it as an investment but I needed to create some excitement at my stall so it mightn’t be a bad idea to bring it out into the world. While imagining how it would look on the stall I found myself at home without having noticed how I got there. ‘Collectors’ Lot, I’m home,’ I said, and switched on Channel 4 in time to catch a man whose obsession was the history of dentures. ‘Amazing,’ said Debbie Thrower, flashing her own original dentition as he showed her a pair of Chinese choppers exquisitely carved in ivory. That reminded me that I had an appointment coming up in a fortnight with Mr Sharif for two implants in my lower jaw, so I switched off the denture man and went down to the kitchen to sort through my treasures.

‘Yes!’ I said, as my own space settled cosily around me. I took off my boots, got a started bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon blanc out of the fridge and poured myself a glass. ‘There!’ I said. ‘That’s better, isn’t it? At least if he gets my bat tattooed on his arm I need never know about it.’

I took the minaudière out of its case and set it on the table. Lot 24, it had been:

An Art Deco minaudière, of hinged cylindrical form, the exterior with black enamel and marcasite decoration, the interior with compact, mirror and aide-mémoire, and with inscription ‘BUDAPEST 1934’, with cord suspension, and tassel concealing a lipstick, in a fitted case.

Inside the case BARUCH, BUDAPEST was printed on the velvet in gold capitals. How had it arrived in London? Could it have belonged to a Jewish woman who left Hungary some time after 1934? Was she tall and elegant? Short and stout? Was her husband in business? This wasn’t something a poor woman would have carried, she’d have had to have the clothes to go with it. Where were her frocks now? For that matter, where was she? I took the minaudière in my hands and closed my eyes as I’d seen clairvoyants do in films. It felt like another time, another life, but nothing came to me.

Nonetheless, I am in my small way a medium — I traffic in ghosts and the possessions, as often as not, of the dead. Almost all of the things I buy and sell were once in someone else’s hands: necklaces from long-gone bosoms, rings from fingers long since departed in one way or another. And the punters, untroubled by ghosts, haggle. If I say, ‘Fifteen pounds,’ they look shrewd and say, ‘Ten?’ So I let it go for twelve; it cost me five.

Why had that man looked so failed? He wasn’t memorable in any way except that.

Have you known anyone else with that look, Mrs Varley?

Objection!

Objection overruled. Witness will answer the question.

Well, yes, come to think of it, I have.

Would you name that person, please.

Giles Varley.

Any relation?

My husband. Late husband.

Thank you. Nothing further.

Giles had blue eyes, a face you could trust, a winning smile, and he worked hard. Bank managers pressed loans upon him and extended his overdrafts as he moved from one failure to another. I did my best to be a supportive wife; I propped him up as well as I could but it was like trying to build a tower out of wet dishcloths, and if I hadn’t been stalling out regularly we’d have gone hungry. In all his ventures he had the necessary capital and skills and knowledge; he had everything except the knack of succeeding. He failed in antique clocks; he failed in stripped pine; he failed in picture-framing; he failed in loft-extensions but when he went into doll’s houses he was quite successful until he found a way out with a bottle of sleeping tablets and half a bottle of Scotch. He left me with a house, a scattering of unpaid bills, and the conviction that if I’d tried harder he might have been a big man in doll’s houses. Giles was a lovely man, really, but if there was one thing I learned from our nine years together it was that you can’t turn a failer into a succeeder and you might as well not bother trying.

I felt doubly bereft when Giles was gone — propping him up had propped me up as well. Some weeks after his death I was in the V & A browsing in Chinese ceramics when I happened on my bat. ‘Off my own bat, that’s how I’ll have to do it now,’ I said to myself, and that’s how I’ve done it ever since, with the tattoo to help me. Being alone is a lonely thing but that’s all there is and in five hundred million years it won’t really matter any more.