Fictional Lives Read Free

there’s knowledge, or there should be.
    People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald
Crucifixion
in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.
    RTK :
So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?
    HF : Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re
less
.

A Wonderful Woman
    S HE HEARD THE NEWS while working in the garden—Maisie just shouted it to her: ‘Brandon’s dead,’—and for a moment felt such a sense of triumph she thought she would faint. He was dead! He was gone. The only one who had ever worried her. The only one who had ever stood between her and peace. Gone, gone, gone … She was sorry of course—he was the same age as her, and fifty-three was too young to die—but nevertheless now she was free, and now nothing would ever be able to disturb her existence, her small old house on its Tuscan hillside, her large garden where she grew all her own food, and her relationship with Maisie. Now she was beyond recall….
    ‘How?’ she shouted back, as Maisie got out of the car holding the newspaper, which she had just driven into the village to buy.
    ‘In a motor accident.’
    She was glad about that too, she thought, as she put the flower she’d been holding in a basket, and picked another. At least if he’d had to go it had been quick; it hadn’t been cancer, or something long and lingering. She wouldn’t have wished that on him.
    ‘Where?’ she called, more hesitantly now—suddenly afraid her friend might hear her joy.
    For the third time Maisie’s quiet voice came down the hill.
    ‘In England.’
    And then, at last, as she took this in, the sense of triumph left her, and she felt nothing but regret.
    Regret that the only writer in the world she admired wasdead; regret that the only man in the world she admired was dead.
    *
    A month later Tina Courtland received a letter from her publisher.
    She had driven into the village herself one morning—Maisie, whose task and pleasure it normally was to buy the paper, had a headache—and decided, once there, to pass by the post office, to see if there was any mail. She hadn’t really been expecting any—she never did—and was surprised therefore when the plain pleasant girl behind the counter handed her an envelope with her name on. She was even more surprised when, having thanked the girl, she went out into the street, and started reading:
    Dear Tina,
    It has been a long time. I hope you and Maisie are well. Here things are very much as usual. I am writing because I have a proposal to put to you.
    I expect you have heard that Joseph Brandon was killed in a car crash a few weeks ago. Naturally we were all very shocked, and literary considerations aside, it was a great personal loss to me.
    Anyway, I have decided—both because we were his publishers for the last twenty-five years, and because it is needed—to commission a biography of him. I have discussed the matter with Margaret, his widow—she has all his personal papers, along with a number of unpublished stories etc.—and she is all in favour, on one condition.
    Now Tina, I know you have written nothing for the last eight years, and swore, when you left London, that you would never write anything again. I am hoping to persuade you to change your mind. Because Margaret Brandon was quite categorical in stating that you were the only personshe would trust to undertake the job, and said that