The Bat Tattoo

  To Gundel

  Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit,

  Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit.

  Schiller

  Whichever way you turn,

  your arse stays always behind.

  German folk-saying

  Contents

  1 Roswell Clark

  2 Sarah Varley

  3 Roswell Clark

  4 Sarah Varley

  5 Adelbert Delarue

  6 Roswell Clark

  7 Sarah Varley

  8 Adelbert Delarue

  9 Roswell Clark

  10 Sarah Varley

  11 Adelbert Delarue

  12 Roswell Clark

  13 Sarah Varley

  14 Adelbert Delarue

  15 Roswell Clark

  16 Sarah Varley

  17 Adelbert Delarue

  18 Roswell Clark

  19 Sarah Varley

  20 Adelbert Delarue

  21 Roswell Clark

  22 Sarah Varley

  23 R. Albert Streeter

  24 Roswell Clark

  25 Sarah Varley

  26 R. Albert Streeter

  27 Roswell Clark

  28 Sarah Varley

  29 R. Albert Streeter

  30 Roswell Clark

  31 Sarah Varley

  32 R. Albert Streeter

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Back ads

  1

  Roswell Clark

  I thought a tattoo might be a good move. I’d reached the age of forty-seven without one but maybe the time had come. In one of my books there’s a photograph of a nineteenth-century Chinese chair cover with two really happy-looking bats on it and I imagined one of those bats on my shoulder bringing me luck. The chair cover was at the Victoria & Albert Museum so I went there to check it out.

  It was one of those global-warming March days: people opening coats and jackets or carrying them. Tourists with maps and guides going up and down the steps while a woman sat there looking up at the grey sky with tears running down her face. There are benches to the right of the entrance but she was on those concrete steps which have very short risers; sitting on them brings your knees up too high — OK for a crying teenager but this was a woman in her mid-forties who didn’t strike me as a public crier. A big woman; even sat down she looked tall and broad with a strong weatherbeaten face, ruddy complexion, wide mouth, heroic nose. Almost I smelled salt air, saw her among barrels and cordage with other women at a long table filleting herring. Or pacing the shore, her shawl whipping in the wind, her eye to the sea.

  When she saw me watching her she put her hand over her eyes. She had mousy hair, pulled back and held with a thick rubber band so that it hung down her back a little way. Black woollen cap, grey jumper, blue anorak, dark-grey long skirt, thick-soled boots with a lot of mileage on them. Heavy-looking shoulder bag beside her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Looked at me a little angrily, I thought. Steely blue eyes. Talked posh, a low fruity voice like what was her name? Charlotte Green. Used to do late news or the shipping forecast on the World Service, maybe both. I have her on tape; she said ‘Dogger Bank’ in a way that made me want to drop everything and ship out on a North Sea trawler.

  ‘You don’t look fine,’ I said.

  ‘What I mean is, I don’t need help.’

  I was about to say that everybody needs help but I decided not to. ‘OK, I’ll leave you to it then.’

  Before going in I turned to look at the traffic on the Cromwell Road. The cars, buses, and lorries all had places to go but I wondered how much difference it would make if they all went somewhere else. I usually have a song going in my head; this time it was ‘Is That All There Is?’ as sung by Peggy Lee.

  In my rucksack was the book with a photograph of the chair cover; it was blue silk with a golden Chinese unicorn on it, and above the unicorn the two bats, one on either side; nothing spooky, they were dancing in that blue-silk sky like paper kites, their fancy wings all curvy and fringy. Getting one of those bats tattooed on my shoulder would be a big step for me — I wanted a closer look and I’d brought a camera with me hoping to get a little more detail than the picture in the book.

  I showed the book to a woman at the information desk; she phoned a colleague but couldn’t locate the chair cover so she gave me a map and directed me to the Chinese gallery. By then the song in my head had changed to ‘From This Moment On’ as sung by Dad and I couldn’t help smiling at that.

  I have a Friends card; I like the way they nod me through when I show it: I’m not a stranger. I always feel good in museums. I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and the voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long-departed Now.

  Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary — you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T’ang Dynasty — their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.

  There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn’t dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends. There were all kinds of things in that gallery but no chair cover and no bats.

  After a while I found myself in front of a large display case with a wonderful ivory boat model in it. It was about two feet long and it was a kind of floating double-decker pleasure garden with banners and lanterns on poles and a mast with what might be a torch basket near the top. The various roofs, doors, windows and sidings were elaborately carved and filigreed. On the upper deck was a dining pavilion; were those flowers on the table, bottles of wine? The boat was being poled along by four crewmen in elegant robes and red caps whose poles reached only to the little square of glass the model rested on. A fifth man was in the bows with what might have been a sounding pole. A card lying on the surface of the square glass river said:

  MODEL OF A BOAT

  Carved and painted ivory, with

  clockwork motor,

  About 1800.

  This model was brought to England

  in 1803 by Richard Hall

  (1764-1834), who had been head of the

  English factory at Canton.

  Looking at that boat I wanted to be aboard it, cruising down a river of dreams while the polesmen stood motionless, the clockwork slowly unwound, and on either side passed the banks of a country never seen before. I cruised for a minute or two on the river of dreams but it flowed past scenes of my Michigan childhood, the white clapboard house in Ferndale, the Orpheus fountain at Cranbrook with the bronze figures stretching their arms towards music they couldn’t hear; it flowed past years of my London life, evening lights and happiness on Hungerford Bridge, Sunday walks along the river, and the crunching impact of metal on metal on a rainy night near King’s Cross. It flowed past tourists sitting on benches in the hall that went through China and Korea, and when I saw a guard I stepped ashore and asked for directions to the nearest bat. He didn’t know, he said, but try Level D, Chinese ceramics.

  Leaving Level A China I took a shortcut through the sculpture gallery and stopped to say hello to Handel. He was very casual in dressing-gown, nightcap, and slippers
(one on and one off), stroking his lyre while a putto leant against his leg and took notes. The maestro was fully clothed under the dressing-gown but the putto of course was starkers. An elderly couple paused in front of the pair.

  ‘Puttophile?’ said the man.

  ‘It was a different time,’ said the wife. ‘There were always putti knocking about in artists’ studios then.’

  With a little guidance from the cloakroom attendant I took the stairs to Lower A, walked east for ten minutes or so past a great many things in bronze, wood, and china, found the lift, and went up to Level D. No bats right off but I had to stop and admire a ‘Model of a Daoist temple and adjacent landscape. Ivory and wood, with mother-of-pearl, semi-precious stones and metals. Chinese, about 1800.’ This was a temple on its own little mountain, with various outbuildings, a tower and a willow-pattern bridge with what looked like one of the chaps from the ivory boat on it, apparently part of a procession to the temple. Might there have been a race of tiny Cantonese working night and day to build the boat and the temple for the export trade? And when the job was done some hand, of a Chinese Vincent Price perhaps, touched them into ivory stillness and here they were. The card went on to say that the model ‘was acquired by the Museum of the Honourable East India Co. in 1810. It was believed to have been intended as a present for Josephine Buonaparte’. I wondered why she never got it.

  I turned left, went round a corner, and there was a display case with various crockery on shelves. The woman who’d been crying on the steps was planted in front of it. Looking past her shoulder I saw a small bowl and a larger one, both with bats on them. The small bowl was pale green, the larger one white; the bats on both were red. I moved closer to see better and caught a faint scent of honeysuckle. Evidently I moved closer than I ought to have done because she turned and gave me a hard smile and said, ‘If you were a bit taller you’d be breathing down my neck.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ll go away and come back later. Do you think you’ll be finished here in fifteen minutes or so?’

  She looked me up and down and I had a feeling that she didn’t like Americans. She was about six feet tall which made it more so. ‘I’m finished now,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen to that.’ She planted her foot on my chest, pulled out her spear, climbed into her chariot, and drove off, leaving me feeling surprisingly tired from so brief an encounter but free to give my full attention to the bats.

  The card for the larger bowl described it as a ‘Lobed bowl, painted with bats, a symbol of happiness. Mark and Reign period of Yongzheng, 1722-1735. Julia C. Gulland gift.’ As I stood directly in front of it two of the lobes were visible with a pair of bats on each. In each pair one bat was pointing up and the other down. Their flight seemed full of unquenchable high spirits. They made the chair-cover bats look repressed, inhibited. The bottom one on the right, the upward-flying bat, was the one that I liked best: it was a Let’s-do-it! bat. Do what? No idea, but I could already feel it on my shoulder bringing me luck. Most of the time people wouldn’t know it was there but I would and it would make a big difference.

  Batting a thousand and feeling good I took out my little Olympus mju-II which was loaded with Fuji 1600. The skylights ran the full length of the gallery and the daylight was more than adequate but just to be sure I shot the bowl with flash and without, from about a foot and a half and from further away. ‘Well done,’ I said, and put my camera back in the rucksack.

  I had the bat I wanted but I felt, I don’t know, that I could have been a bit more of a gentleman in my second encounter with Boadicea. More English. Now that my bat was safely aboard I found myself wondering what her connection with it was. There were other non-bat bowls in that display case and there were other bats visible on the two bowls with bats but she’d been talking to my particular bat — it’s the kind of thing one instinctively knows. What did it mean to her?

  I tried to guess what kind of life she had. Divorced, I thought, not widowed. Living on alimony? Maybe she had some kind of business. No nail polish. Did she do something with her hands? Antiques or something arts-and-craftsy? Maybe widowed, come to think of it — she could have worn the guy out. But the bat? A nocturnal animal. Was she a night person? Was the night a special time for her the way it is for me? ‘A symbol of happiness’. Was she looking for happiness? Not me. I was only looking for my self.

  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.’