Red spots on white VI

SHORT STORY EDWARD HOTEL

Does my son have a sense of humour? It's a question I'd answered in the negative a long time ago, \ and his mother agreed with me, though she insisted he had had a sense of humour as a small boy, say six or seven years old. But since Christmas Eve new evidence, as they say, has come to light.

For the last few years I've fallen into the habit of paying my annual visit to my son on Christmas Eve. He doesn't, of course, care to spend the festive season in the bosom of his family, and to be quite frank the family bosom gets on well enough without him. Though I believe his mother generally rings him up some time in October to extend the invitation, just as a matter of form. We don't want him to think there's any grudge on our side. He lives in a studio flat on Campden Hill. I know its a smart area, but I don't think he pays much rent. There's some vague arrangement with a rich friend who spends most of his time in South America or Morocco; I don't follow the ins and outs of it.

My son is by way of being an artist. I say `by way of,' because that's certainly how he thinks of himself. He has a studio, he has paints and brushes, canvases, linseed oil, palette knives, the whole bag of tricks, and he certainly lives 'la vie de boheme,' or whatever the current term for it is. And he puts paint on canvas. In that sense some might call him an artist. But for me, I may be simple, an artist is a man who produces art, and much as I would like to, I can't in all honesty apply that term to what my son turns out. No, I don't set up to be a critic, but I do believe that an artist must in the first place have some form of talent—I mean be able to do some- thing ordinary people like myself can't do, draw

a face, for instance, or a perfect circle without the aid of compasses—and in the second place he must improve his talent vv ith a good deal of sheer hard work. My son fails on both these counts. He can't draw and he's always been bone idle.

It's not, you see—I'd like to make my own position on this subject quite clear—that I deny a place, even a useful place, to the artist in society. It's just that I don't think my son can lay claim to that place. However, since I've never liked to do more than hint at the distinc- tion to him, I'm afraid he simply believes I'm against artists in general.

My custom is to knock on his door at about tea-time, present hiM with a bottle of port— it's a particularly festive sort of drink, I always think, and I suppose I hope it will be a gentle reminder to him that this is a time when people are enjoying themselves among their friends and relations, relaxing after a good dinner, making convivial conversation and so forth— then I stay to tea and catch a train at Victoria which brings me home in good time to help my wife dispose the holly about the house. We gave up paper decorations some years ago, finding that with just the two of us they made the place seem rather over-decorated.

I thought he was in an odd mood as soon as he came to the door. He's usually pretty curt and withdrawn, I do most of the talking and he contributes the occasional monosyllable. It wasn't exactly that he welcomed me with open arms as one's friends would do, but he was undoubtedly, for him, expansive, and he even opened the batting with an unsolicited remark—`Snowing, isn't it?'

When we got upstairs, he wouldn't allow me into the studio proper, but made me sit down in the small sitting-room next to it, while he clattered about in the kitchen. There was a strange sweet smell in the room, which from my reading of the newspapers, though not from any previous experience, I couldn't help being able to identify. I remonstrated with him when he returned with the tea, pointing out that it would only need one policeman to walk into the flat on some easy excuse, to land him, and indeed myself, if I happened still to be there when the policeman walked in, in the courts. His retort was that if I was worried I had better light up my pipe to drown the 'I thought he was in an odd mood . . :

smell. I did so. Notice that I didn't attempt to moralise on the subject—that would have been so much water under the bridge with him, as I well knew, and there seemed little point in putting up barriers between us on this one afternoon we were together. No, by confining my observation to the possible consequences of his illicit smoking I enabled us to remain on fairly common ground. He retains his healthy respect for the police, which he certainly learnt from me in those far-off days when, it seems ironical now, I was taking some trouble to train him to take his place in society. Anyway, I lit my pipe as he suggested and it must have been the only occasion on which I have ever taken my son's advice. In that sense we were already on new ground with one another.

I was leaning back in my chair, so as to ease my box of matches back into my trouser- pocket, when he came out with another un- solicited remark. It seemed he had sold a picture. Now, although I was not much im- pressed to hear of the sale, in my experience people will buy anything, I was very surprised that he should wish to tell me. More than surprised, I was heartened. Could this mean that he did feel he was a social leper, that he was anxious at last to gain a word of approval from me? If so, the ice was indeed cracking. Where you have the power to bestow a word of approval, there ipso facto you also have the power to register disapproval. It was many years since I had had such an opportunity to penetrate his indifference. So, choosing my clubs with care, I said: `Well done. What did you get for it?' Thinking that if he seemed to feel any pleasure in the financial return, we could do business, as the Americans say. A man who shows interest in a raised standard of living is a man who can be saved.

He completely ignored the question by telling me that it was going on show at the Tate Gallery in the New Year, part of some special exhibition of young `painters' like himself. This was a possible new opening and I tried another club: `Well, well, you must be pleased about that.' But since he showed no feelings either way, I endeavoured to point a way for him: 'One of these fine days you'll wake up and find yourself famous.' I admit I spoilt this one, I could not, try as I would, keep the dis- belief out of my voice. But in any case I came to the conclusion that he was hardly listening to what I said. For some good reason known to himself he was handing out free informa- tion—a thing he normally fought very shy of —but his indifference remained as impenetrable as ever.

However, to keep the ball in the air, I asked him—this time I flatter myself with an entirely neutral, or if anything encouraging, tone of voice: `What's the picture about?' As if the sort of pictures he ran up were ever about anything—simply more or less random daubs of colour, a frame and Bob's your uncle. Still, every father reads great things into his own child's vacant face, so I felt the ques- tion was at least tactful, if not particularly meaningful, to use an expression I abhor.

Instead of answering my question, a most peculiar thing happened. My son launched into some sort of story. Never in my life, believe me, had I heard him tell anything remotely resembling a story before, nor had his mother. I sat there in dumb amazement. Whether the story was true, whether someone had told it to him, whether he had read it somewhere, or simply dreamed it, I have not the slightest notion. As he recited. it, it was both rambling and muddled, and I make no apologies for failing to reproduce his particularly irritating mode of speech, liberally interspersed with phrases like `so this square-toes' and `turned on' and the word 'man' recurring in every sentence.

The gist of the story was that `this square- toes,' a man who detested modern art, had the misfortune to look in on an exhibition of modern art at the Tate Gallery. Why he did so, my son was unable to explain, though I pressed him to try. He could only murmur something like: `had this need to hurt himself, man, that's all.' At any rate, what the man saw there considerably enraged him—the exhibition seems to have contained an unpleasant mix- ture of abstract and what are misleadingly called 'Pop' pictures. (Who they are popular with, I have yet to discover.) But the picture that infuriated him beyond all the rest was one showing a regular series of red spots on a completely plain white ground. This, accord- ing to my son, was bad enough in itself—the sense of boredom occasioned by the ground, the monotony induced by the total regularity of the spots, and their especially dreary shade of red (like real depressing, man')—but the crowning insult was its title: Red Spots on White VI. Not only did it state the obvious, it implied that the obvious had been both painted and stated at least half a dozen times, and that there was nothing to prevent the process going on for ever.

At this point my son's story shifted its focus, or lack of focus as he told it, on to a second character, the painter of Red Spots on While VI. Apparently he was suffering from a fit of melancholia, because although he had been lucky enough to have his picture included in the exhibition, none of the art critics who had written copiously in praise of many of the pic- tures, had so much as mentioned Red Spots on White VI. Such a unanimous cold-shoulder had driven the painter to visit the gallery and com- pare his own picture with the rest. What he saw reduced him to despair—his picture looked weak and untalented beside the others—and the painter, determined to destroy it, drew a large penknife from his coat pocket and opened the blade. My own suggestion here was that the painter's motive was perhaps, far from obliterating his work, to draw it to the atten- tion of critics and public by means of the inevitable newspaper reports that would ensue, but my son stuck to his own more romantic version. The first man, meanwhile, the 'square- toes,' had become obsessed with the banality of this picture and had kept returning to stare at it out of sheer masochism, so that he was the first person to notice when the man stand- ing in front of it opened his penknife. Accord- ing to my son, this bystander became a battlefield for conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he longed to see somebody cut the canvas to shreds, would have liked to do so himself, but on the other, his strong sense of the value of property, of good money paid (even though for a worse than useless object), of law and order, and his horror of hooliganism, violence and public exhibitionism decided him to inter- vene between knife and canvas. The knife . . opened his penknife.'

severed his jugular vein and • he died almost at once beneath the undamaged Red Spots on White VI.

Having finished the story my son relapsed into total silence. We had drunk our tea and after some minutes I got up to go, leaving the bottle of port on the table for him. But instead of accompanying me to the front door, he opened the door of the studio and went in. I followed, thinking he wished to show me some- thing, and saw him standing in front of a canvas propped on an easel. 'Well, now,' I said jovially—his story had gone some way to breaking down the barriers between us—`There you have it. It is, as you said, an exceedingly boring picture. But if only you had the ability to put the story into the painting, then we might all salute you, then you really would be an artist' And ^my son actually burst into loud and prolonged laughter, a thing I haven't heard him do for donkey's years. ,