The guard followed me out of the exit and stood at attention to see me off down the street like so much riffraff. I didn’t rush my departure in case I looked guilty. I gave a performance of casual strolling that must have been convincing despite my leg-nerve problem flaring up and giving me a drunkard’s gait. I turned left at the corner and strolled out of the guard’s sight.
Tilda caught up. She was doubled over in glee that I had the gall to do it—to touch a Van Gogh, actually touch it instead of minding my manners and respecting rules. ‘It must be like touching history,’ she said, grabbing my arm and squeezing it as if a Van Gogh volt might transfer through her.
I showed her the flake in my palm. ‘It’s like touching this,’ I said. ‘It is this.’
At first she didn’t twig. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. Her voice petered out. Her eyes went so wide her forehead concertinaed into her hair. She muttered fuck, and fuck again. That’s when she made her vandal-and-thief accusation. ‘It’s destruction of a masterpiece. You’re a vandal. A vandal and a thief of a piece of history.’ She spoke in a trance, her mouth agape in the shape of an O. She stared at the flake in horror and wonder and awe. She touched it lightly, like brittle treasure that might shatter to dust if she pressed too hard. ‘We have to do something. We have to reattach it.’
I swore it wasn’t deliberate vandalism but Tilda wasn’t listening. ‘We can mail it to them,’ she said. ‘We can send it anony-mously.’ It came down to duty as far as she was concerned. It came down to doing the right thing by Van Gogh and not defiling the very art she honoured and adored. She held out her hand for me to deliver the flake into her keeping. I carefully swept it to her with my fingertip.
Once it was in her hold she clenched her fist loosely, like trapping a butterfly and feeling the flutter of vulnerable wings. She clasped the fist-cage against her throat. ‘You’re safe with me,’ she whispered.
So much for mailing the thing back. She called it her Vincent flake. Far from dishing out more blame, she thanked me for doing it—my vandal crime of paint. She sat on our pension bed and there it was in her palm with all its time-warping magic. She put it in an envelope for hiding in her luggage, though she couldn’t leave it there more than five minutes before needing to take it out and have another look. ‘Hello, Vincent,’ she would say.
Among her drawing paraphernalia was a pen whose gold nib she knew to be exactly one inch long. She measured Vincent as a third of that in length and width. ‘Thank you,’ she said, kissing and pushing me down onto the bed. She yanked my hair and bit my ear. ‘Thank you, you vandal. My darling vandal boy.’
Her eyes were closed, her teeth were gritted ecstatically. I couldn’t tell if it was me she congressed with or a vision of dead Van Gogh.
Chapter 20
Being in love is a kind of being famous. Famous on a small scale to just one person. You are looked up to by them even if you’re really just a child-man. Love is having power over someone. You are the president of them and you are also their servant, and the person you’re in love with is president and servant back to you.
Nothing mattered outside that pension room the week we spent there. We opened the window for oxygen but sent the housemaid from the door when she knocked for cleaning. At night we crept down for food and cigarettes and whisky. As we descended the corkscrew stairs we imagined all Amsterdam was saying, ‘Oh yes, there they are, the couple in room number 12. They’ve been at it for days. They’ll waste away if they’re not careful.’
When you are president and servant you only have one need: to spend every second with your opposite president; except the toilet, when you can at last let your bowels open, avoiding too much splatter and stench.
‘I’m tempted to make a confession,’ Tilda said quietly. She was pillowed on my chest, giving my solar plexus hair a pinch. ‘I’m almost scared to say it but I’ll say it anyway: this is like nothing I’ve felt for someone else before.’
‘Why are you scared of saying that?’
She went silent, just her breeze-breath rippling my nipple hairs and tickling. I realised this silence was to give me time to match her confession with my own. To say, ‘It’s the same for me’ and therefore demonstrate we had equal feelings for each other, no imbalance. I was about to say it, because it was true, but Tilda prompted me. ‘And you?’
‘Same for me,’ I said.
‘Truly?’
‘It’s not like anything before.’
‘What have you got to compare it with?’
I had no love to compare it with.
‘So this is your first time, in love?’
‘Yes.’ I did not want her to think I was inexperienced so I reminded her about Caroline, which wasn’t love but was experience nonetheless.
‘Shsh.’ A soft rebuking. ‘The point is—and this is miraculous to feel—it’s not my first time, yet I feel like it is my first time. Like I am beginning with a clean slate.’
Love’s favourite word is more. It always wants more I love yous. It wants you to say it over and over. ‘Say it,’ Tilda kissed of me. And I kissed the same of her. ‘Say it again. Say it once more.’
Just as sex was too crude a word and congressing was better, even the act of congressing seemed inadequate to express how obsessed we were becoming, how exquisitely ill. We reminded ourselves it was barely a month since the start and yet here we were panting ‘I love you’ in time with each thrust and each expelling, ‘I love you’ in the aftermath, curled groin to buttock in a foetal lull position.
Soon that was not enough. ‘I want to be with you forever’ and ‘Never leave me’ needed to be added. Her saying it, and me saying it in return. ‘If I can’t be with you I couldn’t live. I’d be better off dead.’
That was not enough either. ‘Can I tell you something?’ said Tilda. ‘I am about to be very serious.’
‘Say it.’
‘First say you love me.’
I said it and she said it right back, with a tender tap on my chin.
‘Okay. The thing I want to say is, I would even want to make a baby with you. I’ve never felt that, ever.’
I was really famous now. I had been selected from the world’s millions of males to join my self to hers and create posterity through our genes. I was too flattered to reply.
‘Have I said too much?’
‘No.’ I was the most important man in the world at that moment. I wanted to savour it.
‘Please say something.’
‘I would be honoured to do that with you. I would be honoured to be its father.’
Tilda said thank you. She put her chin on her cupped hands upon my shoulder. She said it was a beautiful sensation to congress with me and have my sperm inside her. It was like being joined even when we physically weren’t. ‘We should start thinking about how we’re going to live.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How we are going to make money.’
I big-noted we shouldn’t worry about that. I’m a clever fellow, am I not?
We didn’t need to panic, Tilda said. She had $40,000 due from her half of her marital assets. But where were we going to live? London was so very far from anywhere she was used to. She was used to sunshine and clean air. If she had a child she would want the baby to enjoy those benefits too, not be closed in by snow and darkness and fog. ‘But I’ll go wherever you are.’