The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The Glanvilles are an extraordinary family. Edwin is a retired bishop who has lost his faith. Marta, a child of the Warsaw Ghetto, is a controversial anthropologist. Their son, Clement, is a celebrated gay painter traumatized by the death of his twin. Their daughter, Susannah, is a music publicist recovering from an affair with a convicted murderer. Over three remarkable years, the family goes through a sequence of events that causes it to reassess its deepest values and closest relationships. Clement's work and reputation are violently attacked and his private life exposed. Susannah's exploration of the Kabbalah takes her into the closed world of Chassidic Jews and a seemingly impossible love. Edwin's illness forces Marta to confront the horrors of her past. Each must find a way to escape the abyss.

Release date: February 4, 2010

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 259

Sample

Clement wondered whether, as a Muslim, Rafik would object to removing his pants. His willingness to work in a bar proved that he was not devout, but nudity might be a taboo too far.

‘I have no shame for my body,’ Rafik said. ‘When Mike speaks to me for your painting, I know what I have to expect.’ The reply, while solving the immediate problem, roused Clement’s suspicions of his boyfriend, who did not usually take such interest in his models, especially when they were sitting for the figure of Christ. No sooner had he announced that he was looking for someone new, however, than Mike had suggested Rafik. At first he had been dubious. His best models were actors or dancers who were trained to submit to a stranger’s gaze. He knew in the instant one entered the studio whether he or she would inspire him: whether they possessed that indispensable quality, not beauty so much as poise, stillness, a way of carrying themselves. Which, in Rafik’s case, was straight from the doorway on to his pad.

He liked to work from life, preferring the stimulus of a model to a photograph or his own creative memory. Unlike his former teacher who had described his subject as the celebration of the female form, he painted both male and female nudes. He was reluctant to idealise the object of his desires. His concern was with the transcendent, the art behind the artist. At the heart of his creed was the word made flesh; at the heart of his credo was the word made flesh made colour; and, although wary of the presumption, he thought of it as a sacramental act.

‘I hope you won’t be cold. I’ve turned up the heating.’

‘There is winter in Algeria too.’

‘Well then… if you’d like to take off your clothes behind the screen.’ Clement, for whom nudity was an artistic statement but stripping an erotic routine, was eager to show Rafik that he recognised the distinction. Rafik gave him a blank look, on to which he projected all his own inhibitions, as he stood in the centre of the room and shrugged off his shirt.

Clement explained that he wanted to do a few sketches to assess his suitability. He made very specific demands of his models. Should Rafik fail to meet them, it would be no reflection on his body but simply that its proportions were wrong for the picture. Rafik smiled faintly and stepped out of his pants.

Unnerved, Clement described his intentions, considering it both courteous and prudent to keep his models informed. His May Day Crucifixion, a radical reinterpretation of the traditional image, had been compromised by a model whose grin looked more like a rush of masochistic pleasure than a smile of solidarity with a suffering world. The new work was to be a Harrowing of Hell, the apocryphal story of Christ’s rescue of Adam, a theme which, while popular in Orthodox art, was relatively rare in the West. He had been invited by the Dean and Chapter of Roxborough Cathedral to submit a design for the great East window. It was set above a dull sixteenth-century altarpiece of the Crucifixion, which it would need at once to complement and transform. The obvious subject would have been a Resurrection, but he had opted for a Harrowing of Hell: not the Hell that the Church taught so much as the Hell that it had created. To which end, it was to be overseen by three clerics: an Anglican bishop; a Catholic cardinal and a Presbyterian minister. He had yet to discuss them in detail with the Dean.

Gazing at the taut perfection of Rafik’s body, the slight frame, satiny olive skin with the thin line of hair running from the cleft of his chest to his pubis, and the disturbing trace of a bruise on his upper thigh, he knew that he had found his model. He picked up his pencil and began to sketch. The question, as ever, was how to put God in the picture. He envied Buddhists, who could express their faith in the abstract and call it Meditation. His was a harder task. As a Christian, he lived in a material world which was also a world of spirit and symbol. As an artist, it was his constant endeavour to recreate the reality that would allow the spirit and symbol to breathe. He had begun to feel, however, that the attempt was doomed. How could people who knew only the bare bones of the Christian story respond to his iconography: the juxtaposition of a clothed Adam, whose body filled him with shame, and a naked Christ, who was literally shameless; let alone his use of the same model for both? Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat had baffled a public unable to make the link between Christ and a barnyard animal. The confusion would be all the greater in an age when The Light of the World was nothing but waves and particles and the Agnus Dei no more than the Sunday roast.

‘Am I right in thinking that Adam is a prophet in Islam?’

‘He is the first prophet.’

‘Was he created out of mud?’

‘The Quran says to us that Allah makes Adam out of dust from many lands. This is why the children from Adam are so different as many lands: white, red, black and yellow.’

‘That’s very beautiful.’

‘In the story, yes.’

‘All religions are beautiful in the story, as you say. It’s when they’re put into practice that they grow ugly.’ Clement felt a pang at the thought of his father, who had come to the opposite conclusion.

‘It also says to us that Allah makes woman out of bone from man.’

‘That’s the same for us.’

‘The Prophet says that man must be gentle with woman because this bone is very easy to break. But I do not see this to happen today. A friend of me is taking bus in Annaba when she is meeting some holy men. They see that she is wearing paint on lips. “What is this?” they ask friend. “It is nothing,” she say. She puts tongue very fast on lips. “Look, it is gone now.” “You must take it off with this,” they say and they give her cloth.’ He grabbed a rag from the bench. ‘Like this. “It is gone,” she say, but they are angry. When she will not hold cloth, they hold it themselves. Inside is blade from razor and they cut off her lips… Sorry, sorry. You do not wish for your Adam to cry.’

‘It’s Christ,’ Clement said, feeling his own eyelids sting. ‘He’s the naked one. And I do wish it. And He’d cry too.’

After drawing for an hour, he asked Rafik to dress. He confirmed that he wanted to work with him, explaining that he had to present the finished sketches to the Dean and Chapter in early March. So he would need him for occasional sessions over the next six weeks, and then, provided that the design was accepted, every morning for a month. Rafik assured him that he could meet the schedule.

‘I must not be at bar until afternoon. In my land I work to become guide for tour people. Rich people who give Rafik big thanks. Here I must wash up dirty glasses. But I am not dead. This is good, no?’

‘This is very good, Rafik.’

‘When I think of my home and my mother and sisters and I have tears, I think Rafik is in England and I am not dead. This is good.’ Clement was struck that he mentioned only female relatives. ‘Now we have meeting today and this is good too, no?’

Rafik stepped forward and Clement thought that he was about to kiss him. A tingle of excitement vied with alarm at the breach of his professional code, and he drew sharply away. Rafik seemed not to notice, prowling around the cluttered studio, exuding a proprietorial air which Clement found strangely endearing, examining CDs and journals, picking up paint-smattered pots and flicking brushes over the down on his arm.

‘Is there a number where I can reach you?’ Clement asked. ‘In case I need to rearrange sessions.’ Or add more, he thought, on seeing the model so in his element.

‘It is best you must ring me in the bar. They are very good persons. They know everything. I live with this man, Desmond. He is kind man. He loves Rafik very much. He loves Rafik too much. You understand, yes?’

‘I think so,’ Clement said in increasing bafflement.

‘If he knows that I come here – even with my clothes – he kills me. I do not lie. And I think he kills you too.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. He is very strong man.’ Rafik’s smile was so sunny that Clement attributed the threat to linguistic confusion. Any attempt to find out more was forestalled by Rafik’s unlicensed rummaging through a stack of near-finished canvases.

‘Why must these be here?’

‘I still have some work to do on them.’

‘So many? It takes how long to make a painting?’

‘It all depends. I’ve been working on that one for four years.’

‘Four years?’ Clement caught the mixture of envy and awe in the voice of a man who was paid by the hour.

‘I know I only have five more minutes work to do on it. The trouble is I’m not sure which five.’

Fearing that Rafik would regard him as a dilettante, he prised the picture gently from him and placed it back against the wall.

‘Each painting you make comes from the Bible, yes?’

‘Not each, but a lot of them.’

‘But Mike, he say you are his lover. This can never be so in my religion.’

‘It’s not always easy in mine. I never planned to specialise. It just came about.’ Lazy journalists liked to suggest that, as a bishop’s son, he had entered the family business. Nothing could have been further from the truth. His father had never sought to influence any of his children. It was pure coincidence that the son of the Anglican Church’s most notorious recent iconoclast was one of its foremost iconographers. At first, he had played down his faith. Art schools might encourage their students to find their own paths, but those leading to Canterbury or Rome were deemed to be off limits. So strict was the prohibition that, years later, when a friend recalled his struggle to come out as gay, Clement swore that it was nothing to coming out as a Christian at the Slade.

True to tradition, he had been liberated by Paris, where he spent three years after graduation. In his case, however, he was inspired less by the vie de bohème, in which he had already dipped a toe in mid-eighties London, than by encounters with the Gothic, above all the medieval painting and sculpture in the Musée Cluny. He filled sketchbooks with transcriptions of his favourite pieces, insisting that he was simply studying their techniques in the way that Delacroix and Picasso had studied the Old Masters. His tutor, however, had known otherwise. Aware of his weekly attendance at Mass as well as his passion for Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, he claimed that there was a vital element missing from Clement’s work and that he would never fulfil his promise until he acknowledged it. Clement was furious, accusing him of wanting to banish him to an artistic backwater. He returned to England, intent on critical acceptance and convinced that he had the perfect subject matter in his sexuality.

Depictions of carnal excess, whether on paper or in mixed media, brought him no more satisfaction than the activities themselves. Then a family friend introduced him to her aunt, who planned to publish her own translation of the Book of Ruth and was looking for an illustrator. Although initially nonplussed, since the friend had failed to warn him that her aunt was a paraplegic who spoke through a voice synthesizer, he came to find her a great inspiration, as uncompromising in her art as in her person. He spent three months making forty lithographs, of which she rejected twenty, and then a further year painting a series of oils based on the prints. The subsequent show in the cloisters of St Mary Abbots changed his life. Not only was it enthusiastically reviewed and sold out within days of opening, but he was taken on by the Albemarle Gallery which had represented him ever since. While he continued to paint both portraits and landscapes, it was his religious work for which he remained best known and of which he was most proud.

He gave Rafik twenty pounds, overruling his protests that ‘I come here for nothing. This is to see if we are good, no?’, and arranged for him to return the following morning. After showing him out, he made a desultory attempt to clear up, leaving the half-full mugs to fester in the sink with a nonchalance that he would never have shown at home. He double-locked the studio and walked down the corridor, lingering at the doorways of the various painters, potters, sculptors, jewellers and woodcarvers with whom he shared the restored Victorian complex. He longed for someone to come out and chat but respected their work far too much to disturb them. He made his way outside and, wincing at the nip in the winter air, went to unlock his bicycle, from which, for the second time in as many weeks, thieves had removed the lights. He gazed at the denuded frame in silent fury. What was worse, he knew better than to hope for sympathy from Mike who, after the previous theft, had claimed that leaving an expensive bike on the street in Kilburn was asking for trouble.

A brush with the north London school run increased his frustration. Belsize Road was icy and he wove a tentative path through the line of hatchbacks, frenziedly pinging his bell as a distracted mother pulled out in front of him without indicating. He felt doubly vulnerable, knowing that a cyclist occupied as small a place in her mind as in her mirror. With a sigh of relief he turned off the main road and entered the park, which brought a measure of protection. Yet, no matter how stressful the journey, he had long dismissed any thought of working at home. He had no desire to convert the conservatory into a studio and so taint his art with domesticity. Travelling to work put him on an equal footing with Mike and his daily struggle to educate the young. He had known from the start that his best strategy with a boyfriend whose puritan conscience was the sole remnant of a nonconformist childhood was to treat his vocation as a job.

The exigencies of the school timetable meant that he cooked during term-time while Mike took charge in the holidays and at weekends. For all his grumbles about vegetarian cuisine, he was happy to abandon the easel for the gentler demands of the Aga. This evening, he was keen to prepare something special, both to thank Mike for introducing him to Rafik and to atone for his rashness over the bike. So, discarding the overripe avocado, he set about making a broccoli and stilton soup. He was so preoccupied that his first hint of Mike’s arrival was a gentle warmth on the nape of his neck. His body flooded with happiness and he swung round to return the kiss. He felt Mike’s grip tighten in a bid for reassurance more urgent than the usual six o’clock confirmation that there was life after school. He squeezed his waist and waited for him to speak.

‘Do we have any wine left over from yesterday?’

‘There’s half a bottle of the Sauvignon in the fridge.’

Mike poured two glasses, downing the first and handing the second to Clement, who took the rush for a refill as his cue.

‘Rough day?’

‘No more than normal. But there’s a limit to what flesh and blood can stand. Snotty-nosed youths sticking out their scraggy chests, waggling their pimply bums and shouting “I bet you’d like some of this, sir.” Why? “Because you’re a pouf, a fudge-packer, an arse-bandit.” I only wish the rest of their vocabulary was as rich.’

With the soup simmering, the flan baking and the salad waiting to be dressed, Clement led Mike up to the sitting room. Knocking a pile of papers off an armchair, he told him to lean back while he bent over him, rubbing his temples and kneading his neck.

‘I could get used to this.’

‘Be my guest. But, seriously, can’t you teach them to value diversity?’

‘For the moment I can’t teach them anything not on the curriculum.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

‘Some of my Year Nines were making fun of “poufs getting married”. I explained that I regard marriage as a reactionary and oppressive institution but that gay people have as much right to be miserable in it as anyone else.’ Clement was glad that Mike could not see his grin. His own view, born of respect for Church liturgy rather than its doctrine, was that the marriage service was unique to a bride and groom and that same-sex couples should be given a service of blessing but, when he had put it to Mike that on balance he would rather be blessed than married, he had been surprised by his violent rejection of any hint of settling for second best. ‘A couple of the Muslim girls told their parents. The parents complained to Derek that I was preaching immorality.’

‘Don’t tell me! Six of the best in the Headmaster’s study?’

‘Something like that. Derek’s running scared. After the business in the Jewish cemetery last autumn, his one concern is that no one should rock the boat. He warned me that I’m not their head of year and I don’t teach RE and insisted that from now on I stick to history. So I asked him to define what he meant by education. He said much the same as I meant by marriage. Equal rights to the misery at the end.’

Mike’s spirits revived during dinner and Clement looked forward to a quiet evening at home, reading or watching a DVD. Their tastes, in many respects at variance, converged in a love of film noir. Mike, however, reminded him that he was going out for a drink with Jonty Hargreaves. Clement tried hard not to feel aggrieved. Of all their separate friends, Jonty was the one he was happiest not to appropriate. A fifty-three-year-old music journalist, he was among four Manchester University graduates with whom Mike had founded a commune in the late seventies. Although it lasted a mere eight years and comprised no more than ten members overall, it had achieved legendary status, not least for its bed rota which, in a bid to remove any taint of monogamy, set out the sleeping arrangements for the week ahead. Even desire was to be collective.

The bed rota collapsed long before the commune although, much to Clement’s chagrin, he was to find that it had left an indelible mark on Mike who, on the pretext of being progressive, divorced his emotional from his sexual needs with the skill of a Victorian magnate.

‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ he said, with an apology for the cliché rather than the conduct.

‘No, but you can put him in a muzzle,’ Clement replied.

Mike insisted that Clement’s longing for exclusive bonds was simply a hang-up from childhood and that he had a right, indeed he sometimes made it sound like an obligation, to enjoy a similar freedom. Clement resented Mike’s need to sleep with other men and blamed himself for his lack of libido, even if he ascribed much of it to his medication. As he watched Mike put on a leather jacket that was far too young for him, he reflected that perfect coupledom was to be found only in the womb.

‘Are you going somewhere special?’

‘It’s up to Jonty. Just a club. A few beers and we’ll see.’

‘So you may not be coming home?’

‘If not, I promise I’ll give you a ring.’

Then, with a kiss so tender that it might have been a prelude to their making love, Mike went out. All at once Clement was overwhelmed by lassitude. Unable to decide if it were the result of Mike’s departure, the stress of a new commission or toxicity in his bloodstream, he abandoned his book, went up to the bedroom and counted out his pills.

Clement kissed Carla warmly on both cheeks and led her into the sitting room. Her wan look was a particular worry in view of their prospective collaboration. Ever since his first stained-glass window for the lady chapel in St George’s, Chichester, she had been his fabricator. Although the purist in him believed that he should effect every aspect of the design in person, the realist knew that, even had he possessed the skill, he lacked the patience. He was heartened by the fact that Matisse and Chagall had left the making of their windows to others. Besides he felt responsible for Carla, whose abilities were undervalued. He used to joke that, if he took the Bible literally, he would be duty-bound to marry his dead brother’s wife. As it was, he just gave her work.

‘I’ve left Peter,’ she exclaimed as soon as she sat down.

‘What?’

‘You never liked him.’

‘I wasn’t living with him.’

‘You warned me against him.’ It was true that he had mistrusted Peter ever since learning that he wrote his name in all his books the weekend before Carla moved in, but then he would not have welcomed anyone whom she had chosen to replace Mark.

‘I suppose there was a touch of brother’s keeper. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want you to become the Widow at Windsor. You were so young when he died.’

‘So was he.’

They paused to reflect on the man whose death had been the defining tragedy of both their lives. It was Clement who had brought Carla into the family. He had met her at the Slade and been entranced by her gentleness, her grace, her humour and her talent. She was exactly the sort of woman he would have fallen for had he been Mark, as was confirmed by their instant rapport when he introduced them. Even so he was taken aback by their whirlwind romance and fearful of his own exclusion. In the event, their growing attachment both cemented his friendship with Carla and deepened his bond with Mark.

For all that Mark, who posed as a philistine, claimed to find their artistic alliance a threat, he was grateful for it the following year when he went off to India, entrusting his new wife to Clement’s care. ‘I know about all you arty types. I don’t want some long-haired minimalist sneaking round the moment my back’s turned to borrow a bowl of turps.’

Mark was one of a team of agronomists working for the Indian government on a project to produce high-yield wheat. They thought they had found the holy grail, a grain that would enable the country to be not only self-sufficient but to export a surplus. What they failed to take into account was how the irrigation needs of the new crop would foster inequalities between farmers in the valleys with access to water and those on the hillsides whose land was arid. The traditional structure of village life was destroyed in a single generation. Families who had collaborated happily for years turned to sabotage and murder. Mark was caught in the middle of one such feud and died after drinking water from a contaminated well. Although the inquest concluded that his death was accidental, Clement was convinced of a cover-up. While he inveighed against God and man, Carla was more resigned, taking comfort from the Buddhist teachings which had sustained her ever since.

‘I’m not young now though,’ she said, breaking the silence.

‘Come on. You were forty last year.’

‘Not if I want to have children.’

‘I see.’

‘It may sound trite but, ever since my birthday, I’ve been deafened by a non-stop ticking.’

‘What does Peter say? Oh, I suppose you’ve already answered that question.’

‘I’ve barely begun. You know of course that Mark and I had planned to start a family?’

‘I presumed so, yes. Though he never said anything. I suppose he was afraid of tempting fate.’

‘For years I felt that, if I couldn’t have children with Mark, then I didn’t want them at all. I think the fact that Peter had two of his own was a part… a large part of the attraction. I’d have a family, and an easily manageable one, without betraying Mark.’

‘But it wasn’t enough?’

‘Nowhere near. Every time I took the pill, I used to think what if just for tonight I forgot. Of course I never did. But when I finally acknowledged what was missing from my life and talked it over with Peter, he said it was impossible. He’d had a vasectomy.’

‘Without telling you?’

‘Without trusting me.’

Suddenly, his pettiness over the books paled into insignificance. Clement pressed Carla’s hand in support, letting it drop when she pulled him so close that their noses brushed.

‘I was out of my mind. With grief, with rage, with everything. I’ve left him, but that only solves half the problem. And then I realised that the solution was here all along. It’s you, Clement. Don’t you see? I want to have a child with you.’ He recoiled as, for one ghastly moment, he thought that she wanted him to lead her straight up to the bedroom. Then he realised his mistake and began to laugh. A whole new world was opening up before him. Every nerve in his body thrilled as if he were deep at work on a painting. He felt dizzy and grabbed at a chair, sitting on the arm in a bid to look casual. ‘I know it’s a shock,’ she said, ‘but it makes perfect sense. This way I won’t be betraying Mark but honouring him. My baby will have his genes just as if he’d fathered him himself.’

‘So what does that make me? The father or the uncle?’

‘Maybe a bit of both?’

The more he thought, the more intrigued he was by her proposal, which felt at once perverse and rich in possibilities.

‘It’s true that when we were kids, no one could tell us apart. If we’d had less indulgent parents, we’d have had the perfect opportunity for revenge. At prep school we played practical jokes to amuse our friends. Then in our teens something changed. I don’t just mean that he broke his nose – the kink was barely perceptible – or cut off his fringe. The difference in our desires affected everything about us, from the way we moved to the way we talked, making it impossible for anyone ever to confuse us again.’

‘I used to wonder why I wasn’t attracted to you. You were so brilliant and kind and obviously good-looking and already a part of my world. I supposed it was just that you and Mark had a different energy. Yin and yang.’

‘Two sides of the same coin.’

Even after eighteen years he felt Mark’s death like a gnawing pain. He had never been as close to anyone as he had to him, his other self in both flesh and spirit. For all his resistance to Freud, he held it to be the key to his personality. While other men might seek to re-establish the primal relationship with their mother, he sought to do so with his twin, yearning to return to the embryonic embrace.

As a boy, his favourite reading had been stories of twins. He was horrified by the bloody dissension of Romulus and Remus but inspired by the mutual devotion of Castor and Pollux. Later, when he came to study Shakespeare, he felt a special affinity for The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. One of his happiest memories of school was of an all-male production of Twelfth Night in which he played Viola and a diffident Mark, Sebastian. So whenever anyone suggested that their relationship must have been tricky, he would instantly set them straight. ‘Everyone should be a twin,’ he insisted, ‘it keeps you from becoming self-obsessed and drives you to define your own identity.’

Even so, he could not help wondering if the need to measure himself against Mark had hampered him. Consciously or not, they had defined themselves by their differences: straight, gay; scientist, artist; Buddhist, Christian. Now he had an opportunity to blur the boundaries, to live something of Mark’s life without giving up any of his own. He would be a father, a role for which he had long since ruled himself out. Yet it was as absurd to think that his sexuality denied him the chance of children as for men of past generations to think that it denied them the chance of love. Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the implications of Carla’s request. If, in effect, he was interchangeable with his brother, a mere source of genetic material, what did that say about his essential nature? Was he a purposeful being with a soul breathed into him by God or just a random combination of proteins and cells?

The weight of both his religious belief and artistic practice had led him to proclaim his autonomy. He was as perturbed by the thought that behaviour might be determined by genes as a Victorian cleric by the claim that humans were descended from monkeys. Yet what if the distinctions between Mark and himself had been superficial, or even illusory? What if the desire to prove their uniqueness had blinded them to their uniformity? For the greater part of human history, people believed that their fates were shaped by inexorable forces, first by many gods and then by one. It was only for a few brief centuries that, whether god-fearing or not, they supposed that they had free will. Current thinking simply redressed the anomaly. People once again believed that they were powerless, controlled by their own DNA.

‘You look so solemn, Clem. You’re making me tense.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s just so much to think about.’

‘I know I’m in no position to make demands, but please don’t take too long.’

‘I hear you: the ticking.’

‘Talk to Mike. It concerns him too. You’ll have to decide how big a part you – both of you – want to play in the child’s life.’

‘Are you planning on just the one or…?’

‘Let’s take it a step at a time, shall we? You never know; I might have twins.’

‘Really?’

‘Aren’t they’re supposed to run in families?’

‘Twins would be good.’

Mike’s arrival prevented further discussion. He flung his arms around Carla, with whom he had always felt more at ease than with any of Clement’s blood relatives. Seizing his chance, Clement escaped to the bathroom where he doused his face in cold water, but it failed to provide the necessary clarity. He resolved to dismiss the matter from his mind until Carla went home and he could talk it over with Mike. There were so many people to consider, not just